XCom: Enemy Unknown
by MisatoKitty
Summary: The invasion of Earth has begun!
1. XCom 1

DISCLAIMER: Relatively standard stuff. Existing character types (specifically the alien races), certain vehicles and buildings, and so forth are properties of Microprose. As the characters are original, the characters are my property, and so's the story (but plot for events belongs to Microprose), hence ownership and copyright of them belongs to me. Contact me at domino@netaccess.com.au if you want permission to use anything I've written for whatnot purposes.  
  
  
X-COM:  
Enemy Unknown  
  
by  
  
Raymond Cooper  
  
  
** Strange Attractors **  
  
  
  
The gravel pit looked like something out of a low-budget science fiction television show. Just something about it, the way the low clumps of mist clung to the rocks as Corporal Peters swung his Heckler & Koch MP-5 from left to right and back again, seemed to suggest back blue-screening effects and cardboard monsters that looked much better on the screen than on the set, without the filtering gaze of cameras.  
  
Off to his left, Sergeant Donaldson raised his hand to his mouthpiece, spoke something quietly into his comlink, then turned to his left, waved another pair of people up. The troops, culled from the British Special Air Service, American Delta Force, Israeli Mossad and Russian GRU, were dressed in standard SAS battle gear, kevlar body suits shaded in greys and blues to blend into the background, fade from sight.  
  
From normal sight.  
  
The Corporal Jake Peters knew only as Yuri went down screaming. Peters blinked his eyes rapidly, trying to clear the green tinge from them. Flashblinded. He hadn't even seen the origin point of the shot. But the green ball, trailing green streamers behind it as it flew along its path, had cut right through the kevlar and other assorted ceramics and buried itself in the flesh underneath. It hadn't ruptured from his back, but one of the first things Peters saw as his sight returned was Yuri on his stomach, a dark, blistering burn mark the size of a soccer ball on his back - residual energies from the shot had torn the uniform all the way through. Some slight element of shock must have set in, because Peters hadn't been aware of turning around while waiting for his sight to clear. He turned back to check where his fellow troops were.  
  
And found the Sergeant had moved them forwards, firing into a bank of mist. Peters raised his weapon to fire in that general direction, but instead saw movement in the corner of his eye. Only the fact he'd turned from the direction everyone else was facing while blinded had placed him in the position to see what seemed to be a small greyish thing, scuttling just over the lip of a nearby pile of rocks. The weapon it had in its hands was long, two bevelled, vaguely rectangular, boxes mushed together not quite right. It was an off-blue colour, and the way the creature sighted along it, pointing at the Sergeant who was once more calling into his mouthpiece for reinforcements, Peters judged it was going to try and disable the force by taking out its head.  
  
A quick flick of a thumb-switch, and the MP-5 went into semi-automatic mode. 3 shots would be fired each time his finger caressed the trigger. And right now, the weapon levelled just in front of his cheek, Peters pulled the trigger twice.  
  
The weapon stuttered, the silenced shots finding their mark up on the rise. The creature jerked backwards, the slugs tearing through its bulbous skull. But the creature didn't want to stay down. Although it had been thrown backwards, it quickly sat upright, and groped for the weapon again. Another half-dozen shots brought it down, for good this time.  
  
Peters then turned his attention towards the rest of the squad. An element of two operatives moved forward while another two elements covered. Peters moved forward himself, taking up his position beside his partner, and from the slight rise he now found himself on, he too could see where the original burst of fire had come from.  
  
As the mist cleared slightly in front of him, he could see, very clearly, the form of a silvery, flattened disc. Like something out of Independence Day, or Mars Attacks! or even Earth vs The Flying Saucers. Steam hissed from around it, and it didn't appear to be open, but there were a number of fallen creatures around it.  
  
From the places they lay, Peters assumed they had been trying to hold the item for retreival, but didn't know for certain.  
  
The comm chatter in his helmet started up again.  
  
"They didn't want us to have it, sir." That was Donaldson. Peters knew the Sergeant's voice anywhere.  
  
"They never do, Sergeant. Is it damaged?" The overall commander of X-com: Base Europa, the origin of the X-Com facilities. Colonel Harrison Lefont. Technically, he should have been a Commander, but he had kept his original army designation when he'd 'officially' retired and unofficially headed up the X-Com operation. He sounded tired, distant, and yet he was parked two hundred metres back in the base's only modified Sukhoi Su-61X Skyranger. Peters guessed it was a combination of the number of missions the unit had been performing of late (three in two weeks now!) and bureaucratic disasters that plagued the unit that was causing the distance with the Colonel; he certainly hadn't been getting much sleep.  
  
Or so Peters had heard. He'd only been forwarded to Europa a week earlier, from the Special Air Service operating in Australia, and this was his first mission. So far, it was almost routine to his training back home, if one subtracted the little grey things - he refused to call them aliens - and added in men in black balaclavas.  
  
Also, a quick glance back at Yuri told Peters that these creatures had a little more in the way of firepower than the terrorists and criminals he'd been trained to fight. The dozen bullets to the head had told him they also either had thicker skulls, or some kind of skin-tight body armour that appeared more effective than the kevlar composite he was wearing at this moment.  
  
"Nossir," the Sergeant replied. "Have the other teams reported in?"  
  
"Area's clear," Lefont returned. "The transport ship that dropped them off took off before our Interceptors could reach them. Blasted Greys."  
  
"So, they insert a commando team - for what? Why'd they drop this thing in the first place? Is it a bomb?"  
  
Peters stared at the silvery disc. It seemed to capture his attention. All of a sudden, he had a powerful feeling something was inside, trying to get out. Locked into the joined discoid tight. Wanting out. But he didn't know how to get her out. Her? some part of his mind asked. But by now, his body seemed to be operating on a dream-like plane, on automatic. He drifted forward, knowing he should say something, but not. No one noticed his movements, as their gaze was turned outward, still watching, waiting to see if any more creatures came at them. A hand reached out, passed lightly over the top. Peters watched it in quiet awe as the disc seemed to light up. Once more, the comms exploded into life.  
  
"Donaldson! What the hell's going on?"  
  
"Dunno, sir, finding - PETERS! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?" Donaldson slapped Peters hand away from the disc, and the former SAS operative stumbled back, shocked, blinking rapidly as his mind was returned to him. The top of the disc hissed, rotated once, then slid along what must have been an internal rail to reveal a young, very human, female.  
  
She appeared to be young, Peters realised, but wasn't. Her eyes when they opened, oriental, a deep chocolate that could eat one's soul, seemed to age her considerably. He also realised she was rather short, with dark hair framing an elfin face. She seemed pale, though, and Peters assumed that had to be shock - surely being kidnapped by those creatures wasn't one of the most comforting things that could happen to a young person.  
  
Donaldson's weapon swung from Peters to cover the young woman. He, too, seemed transfixed by her for a moment, but snapped back to work quickly. "Right! Don't move!" he snapped. The woman stopped moving. "Name! Place of residence!"  
  
The young woman looked at him for a moment, then shrugged, a little worriedly. "Can I see someone in authority, please? I have something important to tell him."  
  
******  
  
Lefont stared in through the one-way glass. The young woman inside continued to stare out, directly at him. It was most unnerving, he decided, as he walked from side to side of the window, her eyes tracking him ceaselessly.  
  
Around her, doctors in isolation gear busied themselves, making sure the new arrival wasn't some kind of new alien weapon - someone carrying biological toxins, or an alien in disguise - before they cleared her for Lefont to talk to. They'd been at it for a few hours now, and the supercomputers put aside for medical use were running overtime, ignoring all other uses for them, as they checked and rechecked genetic information received from the woman.  
  
Lefont had decided she looked to be less than twenty, yet her eyes captured something he defined as showing someone much, much older. Someone who had seen the world to the end and back again. Occasionally, he felt a brief sensation of dislocation, as if he was separated from his body, and at those times, he thought he could hear someone knocking on a door. At least, that's what it sounded like. But it sounded like a wooden door, and there were no wooden doors on base.  
  
This was Europa, after all - home of the next generation of military organisations. X-Com had made this base, shoring up mine workings under a small town called Beckenswood with rooms of metals, plastics and ceramics. X-Com existed for one purpose, and only one purpose: to stop what seemed to be an invasion of Earth by extra terrestrials.  
  
Aliens.  
  
So far, X-Com had only noted one type, with a secondary life form no one was yet sure about - it could have been a robotic servitor-type mechanoid, or a kind of powered armour - and while Lefont was outwardly hoping that would be the extent of it, he knew deep down that there would be more coming. Every race has specifics to its engineering and architecture - certain things are almost racial. Heights of doors and ceilings, types of weapons, standardised equipment. And yet, the alien invasion force had what X-Com-hired researchers said were at least four major influences in their architecture alone. More were suggested in the recovered equipment, but until the final research facilities were completed, Lefont wasn't having anyone do more than look at the retreival items.  
  
One race would be hard enough to beat. Two more difficult. Four, damned near impossible. The amount of industry a single space-faring species could call upon to fuel a war effort was staggering. But combining four? Lefont also privately hoped that he was wrong, that the evidence of at least four races meant that one single race had taken influences from the others, just as the modern world today owed its roots to Rome, Greece, Egypt, and two dozen other ancient civilisations.  
  
He paced to the isolation lab's airlock when he saw the senior doctor head for it, and waited for decontamination protocols to be enacted. Once the doctor was through the door, though, Lefont wanted to know the results of the testing.  
  
"Well, she's human," the doctor, an older man by the name of Singh, mused. "Very much so. The DNA is strong. And without the... the 'dead links' one usually finds in a human."  
  
"Dead links?" Lefont asked.  
  
"Evolutionary baggage that'd died out, long ago. A gene for fur, or claws, sharp teeth, whatever, that's been turned off by the relentless march of mutation." Singh shrugged.  
  
"So... is she human, or just posing?"  
  
"The computers say human." But Singh shrugged. "I'd reserve judgment myself. But you seem safe. I guess she knew where you were, judging by the way she kept staring at the mirror."  
  
Lefont nodded, and entered the isolab, the other physician standing in the back of the room, in case she was needed. The woman on the examination table stared at him from her seated position, chocolate eyes boring into him. He heard yet another knock on a wooden door as this woman focussed her gaze on him, and she waited. But obviously, she didn't get the desired response, because she sunk back into herself.  
  
"We need to know your name," Lefont began, "so we can return you to where you came from."  
  
"My name... is... unpronouncible," the woman sighed.  
  
"Try me," Lefont smiled. "I've been stationed in Japan before."  
  
The woman produced a series of whistles and clicks, and cocked her head to one shoulder, staring at Lefont as if to say, 'well, I *did* tell you...'.  
  
Lefont shrugged. "We need to be able to identify you." Pause. Hesitancy. "We could... always try running you through global DNA banks, see if we can find a match...?"  
  
The woman shrugged. "You won't find a match there, either." Another knock on a wooden door.  
  
Lefont looked around, annoyed, wondering if someone was playing a practical joke on him. When he turned back, the woman was staring at him again, yet this time confused. "Your race... isn't telepathic," she stated.  
  
"My...?" Alien. She had to be. Regardless of the opinion of the computers. Lefont had suspected, but had been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Now he knew for certain. His hand grabbed at his waist, unsnapping his pistol's holster, and he brought up the small automatic pistol in one smooth, easy movement.  
  
The woman shook her head, unconcerned. "I apologise for startling you. It took... a while to understand your language. As you might guess, I was supposed to arrive somewhere much different." She waved a hand over her oriental features. "Yet I am glad I arrived here. What little I have seen... you are the people I am looking for."  
  
"You won't find anything here but death," Lefont said, finger on the trigger. Yet something about her made the action seem unnecessary. She wasn't putting up a fight, there had been no biological contaminant warnings from the computers, and while she suggested the ability to read and control minds, she didn't appear to be. But that could be a problem. What if she could fool someone into thinking she wasn't controlling them when in fact she was...?  
  
"I apologise again," the woman said, ducking her head again. "In my culture, telepathy is as common as your speech. It *is* our speech, our communication. I... was not aware that it was no so here."  
  
"You came here and did no research?" Lefont couldn't help but ask.  
  
"It was... a rather hurriedly-assembled trip," the woman replied. "Yet you still have a problem with me having no name. Very well. How about Sefeliim?"  
  
Lefont couldn't pick any meaning to it. "Is there any reason -?"  
  
"Your culture has references to a group of good beings, known as seraphim, that descend from the skies? I am using that as a root."  
  
Cunning. A skilled infiltraitor might pick such a name thinking that religious groups might at least appear less hostile if the name was similar to that of something that was a force for God. Or perhaps she just liked the sound of a word she'd heard at random, and threw in a couple of random syllables to only alter the sound of the word slightly. "You don't know we're not telepathic, yet you pick out obscure religious references to base your name on?"  
  
Sefeliim shrugged. "Some humans apparently think they're telepathic, according to thoughts I've heard. Most others don't think about it. And apart from you seeming to be so rude by ignoring my repeated requests for a talk," the knocking explained, Lefont realised, "I had no idea you humans weren't telepathic. I just thought you either didn't understand me, or were being deliberately rude."  
  
"You controlled one of my troopers -"  
  
"Escape pods can't be opened from the inside. Not that class, anyway," she shrugged. "And I did need one of you to get me out. I asked, no reply. I know why now."  
  
She seemed... unconcerned with the situation she found herself in. Like it didn't touch her in any way. Maybe she knew something he didn't, was going to pull a metaphorical rabbit out of a hat. But if she could read minds, and had been until now - heck, he only had her word she wasn't reading his right now - then she knew what the general feeling about aliens. Lefont wondered whether she could control the whole of the base's population at once. He shivered. Currently, that was only just under thirty people... not necessarily a huge task for someone who could possibly be the equivalent to a giant in a kindergarten's sandpit.  
  
She was still staring at him, obviously waiting for some kind of reply. Her body language didn't seem to be terribly unfamiliar - possibly, while mindraping everyone she'd come into contact with, she'd been picking up bits and pieces from here and there. And the reason she was so unfamiliar with it was she was using most of it for the first time.  
  
But what could he say? He couldn't read her like she could him. Not even physically, her body language was as yet too alien for him to be able to decipher most of it. And what he could understand was likely faked.  
  
"What do I do with you?" he wondered, aloud. He started, not realising he'd spoken until she cocked her head slightly to one side. Carefully, he felt through his brain, seeing if he could feel her there. But no, he couldn't actually feel anything different. It wasn't like when he was hearing the knocking, not like it was an almost physical thing. So he guessed for the moment, she was either not in his head, or was keeping very low-key.  
  
"You could always ask me questions?" she replied, eventually.  
  
"Where do you come from?" She pointed upwards. "But where up there?" A slow shrug, measured out, making sure she had the right action.  
  
"Far away, I think." She slowly shook her head, becoming more confident of the gesture as she made it. "But I don't know. Where is here? Are we still in the ?"  
  
"What?" Lefont asked, not quite sure he had heard that right. She'd spoken - if one could call it that - in a series of clicks and he was certain, an undertone of a warbling whistle.  
  
"I'm sorry. I, uh, don't have the correct words." Her language was a lot less stilted than it had been, that was for sure. And she was gaining confidence in her human-style body language, too. "Do you have star charts?"  
  
This was X-Com. The Extra-Terrestrial Combat Unit. They were in a secret war against aliens, trying to shoot down UFOs from another planet. Of course they had star charts. Lefont led her to a computer terminal, called them up from the public access database, so there was no chance of her finding anything classified in any searches she might make. He brought up the basic local chart first, showed her how to manoeuvre the map screen around in any of the three dimensions.  
  
She sat there for some time, frowning. Occasionally, she'd move the map around, but then, eventually, she shrugged and leaned back from the terminal. "I recognise none of these. The spectral classes of many of the stars are the same as some I know... as well as mass measurements... yet... none are in known configurations."  
  
"They move over time, you know," Lefont suggested, unhelpfully as it turned out as she fixed him with a baleful eye.  
  
"I do know this." She drew herself up. "I may be a socialogist, but everyone on had... oh dear... words not working again. We'll call it... T'leth. I... think that's the correect sound in your language... does it make any sense?" Lefont shook his head. "Ah, well. Everyone who was on Upper Primary Staff was required to know where we were at all times. Hence, we learnt a lot of stellar information. And my people, we soak up information like sponges." She tapped the side of her head. "Enlarged memory centres, you see. T'leth was a colony vessel, supermassive in size. Some 400 billion tonnes, in your measurement system."  
  
"What happened to it?"  
  
Sefeliim's eyes took on a misty look, gazing backwards in time. "There was a catastrophic failure in our primary navigation systems. Solar flare from a minor G-type star... yours, I believe. We were locked on course to swing around a gas giant and slingshot out of the system before the flare hit... but with navigation gone, we had no way of setting up for the final approach. So we... guessed it."  
  
"And?"  
  
"By the time we got basic navigation back up, the vessel was locked on course. We couldn't change it. We were heading for a primitive planet, seemingly no technology, seemingly no intelligent life. And crashed. Oh, an expeditionary ship was launched, moments before the crash... I was on that ship. Locked into stasis shortly after the crash. Like, a few minutes. And that was all I knew until I was awoken. I think mistakenly. There were people on the ship I woke on... that weren't my people. Telepathic, so I announced myself. And the ship went quiet. Then alarms started screaming, and I jumped into the enarest escape vessel I could to get away." She locked eyes with Lefont, deep, dark eyes that promised greater depths to her soul than Lefont could imagine. "Like I said, a hurriedly-assembled trip."  
  
By now, Lefont had some nasty ideas. "Do me a favour, and move out of the way." Sefeliim did, and Lefont took her place. He tapped in some numbers, and waited while the computer churned through alterations to stellar positioning. "This might not be completely accurate," he said, leaning back so the woman could look at the screen, "but it's based on the best predictions our computers can manage, with what we know about stellar drift and galactic drift. Do any of these configurations look familiar?"  
  
Sefeliim stared at the monitor with intensity. She scrolled through the map, looking, checking, obviously dredging things up from memory. As she worked, she murmured, "I'm so sorry for the devastation we must have caused on impact. But I didn't see anything down here when we came close... no signs of technology, no signs of... well, intelligent life. So it must have been a few years ago, or more than our navigational systems were malfunctioning."  
  
She isolated a binary star system. "This is home. We live on the fifth planet out from this star." She tapped one.  
  
"Zeta 2 Reticuli," Lefont read, musing before eyeing the woman again. "So, what... what do you really look like? How much of a mask is this body of yours?"  
  
"It's... detailed. Complicated. Needless to say, I can't retake my original body without a lot of preparation. Else I might do some major damage." She shrugged, and held a hand up, about four feet off the floor. "Yet, I am about this tall. My eyes... are larger, slanted as they are now, darker. No hair. Four fingers and no... whatever this is." She waggled her thumb. "It's very useful, though... and we're a light shade of brown. Kind of like this colour." She stroked the skin on her arm, and looked thoughtful. "I've answered your questions, as best as I can. Can you answer mine? Where's our colony ship? We've got millions of people onboard who have to know we've been enslaved... surely these slavers can't have reanimated everyone..."  
  
"I've got one more question to ask, uh, Sefeliim," Lefont said, slowly. "Did those star configurations on that map look familiar to you?"  
  
"Oh yes," she replied, nodding emphatically. "A few light years out in some cases... but yes. Why?"  
  
"There's a reason... that you detected no sign of us here when your ship crashed. When it did hit the Earth, it wiped out some 80% of all life on the planet, 97% of all species. The climate changed for what could have been hundreds of years."  
  
"And your race... it came out of that period of climatical change? Assumed dominance then?"  
  
"Oh no," Lefont replied. "My race was still about this big." He held his hands up, with about the length of a mid-sized rat between them. "That was a very long time ago. Your ship hit the Earth about 64 million years ago."  
  
******  
  
Mars.  
  
Cold, dead place. Red oxides line the surface, evidence of a huge cometary strike that devastated the small world only a few thousand years earlier. But life does exist on this red and pink planet, if one knows where to look.  
  
The place is Cydonia. A ruined face stares up from the ground, lighting constructs around it. Ruined buildings, remnants of the city that once stood here, dot the landscape. Yet, from inside some of these near-destroyed facilities, life exists.  
  
Aliens, much as Sefeliim had described, walked along darkened corridors, entertaining no thoughts of their own. Language undecipherable blared from hidden speakers.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Through all this, in his command office, high above the Central Command chamber, Nefflim watches his fellow Sectoids scurry about, carrying out operations as the highly efficient species he knows his people to be. With emotions and thoughts removed, they, like so many other races, are incredibly hard-working. A virtual slave-labour force. Nefflim takes no particular pride in this, though. His mind is reserved for more... important matters than musing on the fate of the race he was entrusted with, oh so long ago.  
  
On his workstation was a message, relayed in from Carrier Iota-1, before it had left Earth orbit. It appeared a stasis pod from the original colony ship crew had been reactivated by accident - a power surge caused by the human's prototype SDI systems put in place some years before. The member of the Upper Primary who had been awakened... well, Nefflim knew her, too. Unadapted. Uncontrolled. A rogue unit. And she hadn't been recovered. She could be very dangerous to him and his forces. Very dangerous indeed.  
  
Thoughts alien to his head probed for memories of the creature he once called his sister. Dug, found what it needed, withdrew to allow him to continue to work.  
  
Hmm. A Sectoid working for the fledgling X-Com agency. Nefflim would have to step up the planned operations on Earth. To this end, he began composing plans in his head, revising schedules. The take-over of Earth, the recovery of the molecular control system, and the reactivation of the T'leth mothership... all would be accelerated. The invasion must succeed.   
  
Or the Sectoid race... and it's controllers...would cease to exist. 


	2. XCom 2

DISCLAIMER: Relatively standard stuff. Existing character types (specifically the alien races), certain vehicles and buildings, and so forth are properties of Microprose. As the characters are original, the characters are my property, and so's the story (but plot for events belongs to Microprose), hence ownership and copyright of them belongs to me. Contact me at domino@netaccess.com.au if you want permission to use anything I've written for whatnot purposes.  
  
  
X-COM:  
Enemy Unknown  
  
by  
  
Raymond Cooper  
  
  
** Missions of Eternity **  
  
  
"When can I go outside?"  
  
The voice sounded tinny, from where Harrison Lefont, Colonel, Commander of the Extra-Terrestrial Combat Unit stood on the outside of the isolation tank. He knew that was merely a product of the tank's liquid content compressing the occupant's vocal sounds, distorting them as if she were in an enclosed metal room.  
  
Sefeliim wasn't being harmed, though, nor locked away from people. Just that certain precautions had to be taken first, before she could be let out. Lefont didn't reply to her question. She'd been asking much the same thing for the last three days, while the base's scientists went through her DNA with a fine-toothed comb, checking for inconsistancies, whether they'd made any mistakes on their initial report, and whether or not they could find out if she was telling the truth.  
  
X-Com now had corpses of the type of alien this Sefeliim claimed to be. Tightly-wrapped, pruned DNA or not, she should still show some signs of that alien physiology within her somewhere. They'd also found some cybernetic implants in the alien creatures; there were no sign of them within the female in the tank, but then, if the technology was sufficiently advanced, it might only be able to be detected by autospy... or biopsy. Vivisection, while not outlawed with respect to aliens (having no official recognisation as to their existance - how can someone ban actions against imaginary creatures?) was still against Lefont's moral code.  
  
Perhaps if things got worse, though... then he might have to take some measures he really didn't care for.  
  
Of course, right after taking them, he'd have to put a gun to his head and scatter his brains out on a wall opposite him, and seeing as he had no wish to kill himself...  
  
He'd find another way to do things.  
  
If possible.  
  
"Hello? Is this thing working?" Sounds of tapping filled the speaker. Lefont smiled, leaned forward and opened his end of the comm.  
  
"Relax. Our testing should be over soon."  
  
"Really," she said from inside the tank, sounding faintly annoyed - god, she was picking things up quick! - but patient as she had been since she had been placed into the tank. "You'd never guess." She sighed.  
  
Lefont smiled to himself. "Are you comfortable?" he found himself asking.  
  
silence greeted him. Then, after a few moments where he wondered if she was okay, he felt a presence behind him. Turning, he saw Sefeliim, her form wavering, altering to a light brown with her exposed skin. "Do you really wish to know?"  
  
Lefont's mind stepped back to look at the situation objectively. She'd escaped from the tank. She had to have. Then, he noticed something. Although dressed merely in the underwear she wore in the tank, she seemed to not be standing on the floor, but hovering slightly above it. Then he understood. "You're... mind-controlling me," he struggled to explain.  
  
She smiled, slowly, serenely, as if not too used to it, but doing it more for his comfort than because of her own internal feelings. "No... but I am using my mind to contact you."  
  
"Is this... dangerous?"  
  
"Not to either of us. It is... like..." Her voice trailed off, and Lefont felt something in his mind. Her again. Generally, he could feel what she was looking at or for, as he got images of what she checked. She seemed to be careful, staying away from personal thoughts and official matters, once she'd realised the human race didn't actually have obvious telepathic ability, yet he still couldn't help but feel she was sucking more from him than he wanted known. "Astral projection," she settled on, finding an image in his memory from some old television series. "Being able to project my thoughts into contact with another. With a visual hallucination for them to converse to. And, this visual representation of me can 'see' and 'hear' everything in that region."  
  
"You can project your thoughts anywhere?" lefont asked.  
  
Sefeliim shook her head. "No. Only to a specific location, where someone I know well is located. I could not, for example, roam outside your immediate vicinity as I have little personal connection to anyone else in this facility."  
  
"You speak with bigger words and a more formal tone when talking in my mind," Lefont noted.  
  
"Minds are much better for communication," she shrugged. "I am not needing to regulate my body language to be understood as your brain does it for me. And the clarity of this conversation... is different for all perceived. How I see this conversation is different to how you see it. Because our brains are communicating on a most basic, primal level where language does not enter into the equation. We are... comunicating with images, feelings, ideas. It is merely our brains that construct it into these images and sounds we see."  
  
"How do you see this conversation?" Lefont asked. "Could you show me from your point of view?"  
  
Sefeliim looked uncomfortable. "I could, but I fear it might damage you."  
  
"How?"  
  
"My viewpoint, if you will, is much different than yours. I have different points of reference, different layers of subtlety, and many more lines of thought and communication than your brain can safely handle."  
  
"Try me." Lefont was stubborn. Sefeliim sighed.  
  
"I cannot be held responsible for the damage caused. And your troopers will hold me accountable."  
  
"They won't know it's you."  
  
"Yes they will! It is no secret I have mentalic abilities far above the norm for this world. I displayed the ability to control minds upon arrival. You have noted in your logs I show increased capacity for mental communication. Anyone who finds you with burst blood vessels in your brain, be you dead or alive, will still spell out the same fate for me." She sounded a little worried.  
  
"I'll take that risk."  
  
"That risk is not yours to take! This is *my* life we are talking about, not yours!"  
  
"You don't care for my life?"  
  
"I do! Yet if I harm you through doing as you say, my life ends regardless if you cease to live. It is... not a situation I wish to be a part of."  
  
"Try me. I wish to know if I can trust you."  
  
The image before him chuckled, turned away slightly. "You cannot trust me. No matter how much I wish to convince you otherwise, no matter how well we may work together, or converse, share ideas and knowledge... you simply cannot afford to trust me. Because I am not like you."  
  
"We can work together, perhaps," Lefont said gamely, perhaps too gamely, realising how forced and condescending he sounded. Of course, being the more advanced alien being, she'd know how primitive minds thought. Humans hadn't met aliens before the recent silent attacks, at least as far as governments were concerned. And officially, that was still the policy. But governments and various commercial entities were now aware of them. X-Com had been formed to try to halt whatw as obviously becoming an invasion. Thus far, they'd been more successful than the Kiryu-Kai of Japan, who'd been disbanded only a few short months ago.  
  
Yet, downing a half-dozen UFOs, and 'rescuing' one alien shapeshifter, wasn't considered too much of a success in Lefont's eyes. In doing so, he'd lost one of the two F-22X 'Lightning' interceptor fighters the base had been commissioned with, as well as nearly a dozen troopers in a little under a month and a half. Troops could be drawn from special forces globally, but those sources would dry up, unless X-Com troopers were given a better chance of survival in the field. The fighter aircraft, though, even getting then at a greatly discounted price from Boeing/Lockheed Martin, were a major loss to the facility.  
  
He found it somewhat ironic, though. The only operation prepared to admit alien life existed and dealt with that existance on a daily basis... was being trained to kill all alien life.  
  
And here was some alien life, standing - well, floating - directly in front of him. "We can work together. You know that's not going to be a problem. We're professionals." He subtly stressed that last word.  
  
Sefeliim shook her head again. "It is a nice dream, but you and I both know the human race is not prepared to admit that the enemies you are facing right now... are not all enemies." She shrugged once more, slowly, letting the motion ripple through her upper body. "What is more, from what little I know, I do not think you can afford to think that yourselves, either. Once you start thinking of us - of them - as people... as individuals, you lose any effectiveness as a combat team you might have against my... my former people."  
  
"Are you really... not working for them? Tell me that, look me in the eyes and tell me that, and I'll believe you."  
  
Sefeliim smiled again, sadly this time. "I cannot do that. You cannot believe me. I am too alien. Looking one in the eyes for my race means nothing other than you are facing them. It does not denote falsehood if I say something while not looking in your eye - with our telepathic abilities, we have no need to observe body language. Thoughts, feelings, emotions - these are much clearer forms of communciation when not being made to be observed."  
  
"Direct communication is the only way to go, eh?" Lefont asked, a little wryly.  
  
"Indeed." She paused. "I can work for you. Perhaps with you. I can give you... my word that I will not betray you or your trust. For what little comfort that may give you."  
  
"Why are you fighting against your people?"  
  
"If they are my people. Remember, sixty-four million of your years have passed. And my people were trying... well, I do not know what they were trying to do when you recovered me. Perhaps they believed I was in danger in your hands, and perhaps they were trying to kill me before I could become a threat." She paused. "I did not feel any contact from them while I was waiting for one of your men to come close enough to open my vessel."  
  
She hadn't mentioned that in their other talks. "And yet, there were... I'm sorry, I can't pronounce your words at all, so I'm gonna call you all Greys. There were Greys at the crash site? Armed? We've downed many of their craft, found them inside. They've all been hostile."  
  
"They also had mechanical implants, correct? I have no such devices. It was not common for mechanical implants to be used on my people even before the crash - only those injured used them."  
  
"Like... amputees having prosthetic limbs?"  
  
Sefeliim's face lit up in understanding. "Yes! Yes, exactly! To replace functions ceased through injury." She turned slightly sour again. "My people are not hostile naturally, Harrison. I believe... I was not meant to be reanimated. At least, not before I'd been altered to be like them."  
  
There was a buzz from behind Lefont. He turned, toggled a comm. "Yes?"  
  
"Sir. We've completed our tests on the subject. There are traces of a secondary DNA strain lying in... what we have decided are reserve positions."  
  
"Reserve?"  
  
"A storage area. Possibly, to be called on at a later time to replace the dominant DNA strands currently making up the subject's physicality."  
  
"Like... a backup of another body?"  
  
"Essentially, sir. What do you want us to do with the subject now?"  
  
"Make a complete report, have it on my desk in the morning. As for the subject..." Lefont sighed, pressed a hand to his forehead, then rubbed at the bridge of his nose with his fingers. Damn these decisions. He felt the presence behind him disappear again, knew without looking at Sefeliim was back in the tank, body and mind connected again in the same location. Obviously, she'd left him to make the decision without wanting to know in advance if it was going to go badly. "Release her. Into armed custody. Bring her to me in the command centre."  
  
"Uh... yes sir. But you know she's a -"  
  
"Yes, I do. And for the moment, until we can accertain what side she's on, let's give her the benefit of the doubt."  
  
"Yes sir. Understood, sir. Science out." The comm clicked closed, and Lefont slumped into the wall. She was right, of course. He couldn't afford to trust her. Yet, she'd be an extremely invaluable tool in this war. And yet again, any alien overlord could realise that just that very fact would make it extremely easy to get an agent into a human base opposing alien forces... He pinched the bridge of his nose again; this could drive him insane.  
  
Perhaps Sefeliim hadn't been so crazy after all when she'd said the depths of her mind would drive him crazy.  
  
Just normal human activities and thoughts were doing that to him already.  
  
******  
  
Sefeliim was pulled from the isolation tank by her arms, dripping suspension gels from her bare skin. The two soldiers who had grabber her forearms to yank her upwards continued pulling until she was standing on the rim of the tank, letting her go to make the final step up onto the floor of the room above the tank's ingress/egress hatch. One then handed her a towel to clean herself off, which she made cautious use of. The hostility radiating from both men was staggering, and to a being who wasn't empathic, it would have been staggering. For one who was, it was that and more: it was also incredibly frightening.  
  
She'd left Harrison before he could give her an indiction as to which way he was leaning. On the one hand, it might have been nice to expect the bullet through the skull, which she was expecting, since there was no reason these humans should trust her, while on the other, she felt it would be more difficult, knowing that as soon as the hatchway above her opened, she'd take maybe only a few more breaths, see maybe only a few more images, before everything went dark forever.  
  
Now, she wasn't so sure she'd have preferred to know she was going to die. At least then, she'd have been able to prepare herself to die with dignity.  
  
As it was, she could barely stand.  
  
She couldn't understand why she was led to a shower facility, ordered to strip completely, and wash off the gells and liquids she'd been immersed in. She expected that they would interfere perhaps with the bullet's trajectory, or maybe soak into her organs upon death or somesuch, rendering her useless for dissection.  
  
The soldiers stood behind her as she stood naked under the warm water, scrubbing slowly at first, then ever more vigourously as she decided to enjoy her last minutes after all. As she turned to rinse her hair out, she caught sight of both soldiers staring intensely at her, fingering their rifles. She continued scrubbing and cleaning, enjoying the play of the water over her skin.  
  
Eventually, she turned off the taps, knowing that soon, she would walk no longer, touch no more. She savoured the feeling of the metal under her fingertips, then let them run over the tiles of the wall as she walked for another towel. She dried herself, making sure there was no water left on her anywhere, and turned to the soldiers. "Now what?" she asked briskly. Shooting her naked in the shower would help a lot, she supposed. Blood and gore could be washed away, any tiles cracked or broken replaced easily, she guessed, no clothing to have to dispose of on the tables in the labs.  
  
But one of the soliders stepped forward, thrusting a bundle at her with one hand while nervously fingering his rifle with the other. The other soldier covered him, not so obviously, but just moving to a clear line of fire and tilting the nose of his MP5 upward a little, so it would take little effort to raise higher.  
  
Sefeliim knew right then that she had an out. She could invade the second soldier's mind, raise that gun up a little more and shoot his friend in the back. Then force him to turn the gun on himself - and then what?  
  
She'd be showing then that she was as bad as those of her kind these people fought.  
  
And that was something Sefeliim wasn't. She couldn't see how her people had been turned to that kind of violence now displayed, even in such a long time. Of course, 64 million years should have evolved them far beyond what they were now, so perhaps they'd also been locked in stasis, as the Upper Primary Staff had been on launching from the crippled T'leth...  
  
Shaking herself out of these thoughts, she took the proferred package hesitantly, and unfolded it. Items of... clothing, she found, on a quick inspection. What Harrison thought of as 'genes'... no, 'jeans', and a shirt. As well as clean underwear. Getting used to a new body was irritating, yet also worthwhile, Sefeliim found. For example, the humble bra: a miracle of basic engineering designed to give back support and make one... well, perkier was the only term that came to her mind at present. Not a word her race had much experience with, she thought, cupping her hands over her smallish breasts once she'd fastened the item around her back.  
  
The jeans felt nice against her skin, rough, coarse, hard, and yet comfortable. The sensation was nice. The shirt was somewhat thinner, a little looser, the sleeves falling a little past her elbows. Once dressed in these clothes, she looked up at the soldiers again. The one who'd handed her the clothing had turned away for a moment to grab something else, then turned back to her again, shoes in his hands.  
  
Heavy shoes, more like boots than anything. Made of leather. Made from cows, Sefeliim noted, the information coming to the fore of her mind readily. Like all of her species, she had massive control over memory recall, as well as a near photographic memory. Perhaps not anymore, though, she thought sadly.  
  
Sefeliim found a pair of shocks in the shoes, pulled them onto her feet, then pulled the shoes on and laced them up using quick deft movements she'd grabbed from the forebrain of one of the soldiers standing guard over her.  
  
Once that action was finished, she hesitated in standing upright again. This would be it. Now they'd take her to wherever they were going to shoot her.  
  
The soldier nearest her stepped aside, the other gestured her forward with his gun. She walked past them, out the door, turned and was directly dumbly to her final destination.  
  
The doors had a large 'X' on them, what she now knew to be the symbol for X-Com. One of the soldiers stepped past her, pressed a button on a control pad to one side of the doors, which jolted, then slid smoothly apart.  
  
Once apart, she was gestured forward into a darkened alcove. Once inside, she could see into what she assumed was the command centre of X-Com base Europa: a huge, double-floored room, with a chunk taken out of the upper floor to allow vision down towards the main object in the room: a giant monitor with a graphic of a spinning globe on it. She recognised some of the landmasses represented in the image, although greatly changed when she'd last seen this view, from T'leth as it hurtled towards the small world, and guessed that the image was updated via satellite feed or somesuch. Several concentric circles ringing what she assumded was this base facility were extremely visible, and she guessed this was some form of detection radius.  
  
On a small podium towards the centre of the room stood Harrison. It figured. He was a nice man, even by her people's standards. He must want to be the one to pull the trigger, she assumed. It was the only morally responsible action to take when assigning execution orders.  
  
One of the soldiers behind her nudged her gently - with a fist, she noted, rather than his gun - in the direction of Harrison. She stepped towards him, hesitantly at first, gaining confidence as she thought she might as well go out proudly. "I am here now," she announced once she'd arrived at the edge of the podium. Harrison looked down at her from his position for a moment, then gestured to her to step up beside him.  
  
"This may be difficult," he said at first, unsure of how to proceed. "But I think... we can all put aside our differences... and work to... a mutually beneficial conclusion."  
  
It sounded unrehearsed even to her. He'd obviously been trying to think of a way to say something of import. It was there on the tip of his brain, she could almost see it, he was screaming it so loud at her. But she didn't want to go inside of him again. Not just yet, anyway. She had to remind herself often that as humans weren't telepathic, they did find it more than a little threatening to have someone knowing about their thoughts, their lives...  
  
... and then something clicked in her head. He hadn't mentioned killing her. Working together? "What... what kind of conclusion would I find beneficial?" she heard herself asking.  
  
Harrison considered. "There have to be more of you, I'd guess. If you were locked in... stasis, then perhaps others are, too. Like you said, no alien force could reanimate all those millions. Not if they're invading us as slowly as they are."  
  
"Is there such a thing as a slow invasion?" Sefeliim asked.  
  
"Well, we're currently the only force that can fight them on this planet, and we're understaffed to fight any kind of serious threat force." Harrison shrugged. "I'd guess that a large invasion force just isn't an economic option yet."  
  
Sefeliim shook her head. "My people didn't have an economy... well, not like your brain is suggesting, at least. We're not..." she searched his mind quickly for the word. He didn't seem to mind. "We're not capitalists. If invasion was our goal, we'd simply produce and refine the materials to make our ships, then come at you. Thankfully, we're not into invading anyone. We're peaceful. Defend ourselves if attacked, but that's about it."  
  
"We've downed half a dozen UFOs in this base's operating region," Harrison mused, "but detected maybe another twenty or so confirmed reports. Globally, there's been maybe two hundred confirmed sightings or detections, and around a further two hundred confirmed reports of alien activity without any craft being noticed. most of the detected crafts fit nicely into recognisable ships, based on their radar returns, infra-red signatures, emissions, various other detectable traces. There seem to be few large ships about that we've detected, and those we've been theorising are akin to our naval carrier vessels - bigger ships used as deck space to transport smaller, short-range vehicles long distances."  
  
"If this is the case, and these vessels are being shipped in, then you'll need to strike at their economic base - I mean, factories, industry and the like rather than some kind of monetary offices - to stop them. If we can pinpoint those facilities, how long would it be until you could stage any kind of raid on them?"  
  
Harrison stared. And Sefeliim felt a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach. "You don't have intersteller capabilities, do you?" she asked, softly, rhetoricially. Although she'd never looked for that information in the minds of the those around her, she'd had glimpses of men walking on other planetary bodies. That, and the level of technology she'd seen evidenced around her was suggestive of a primitive spacefaring race that could travel between stars, albeit slowly.  
  
Well, she supposed they still could. Just much, much slower than she was expecting. Than was needed.  
  
Damn.  
  
She shrugged, almost to herself. "So they can grow, and you... you really can't?"  
  
"You didn't know before now?"  
  
Sefeliim shook her head. "No, I didn't. I assumed... I shouldn't have. I think I'm not as good a sociologist as I once was, to have missed that fact."  
  
Harrison shrugged. "Don't blame yourself," he found himself telling her, "we can travel in space... just not very well. It's very expensive in our economical situation and structure." The alien nodded agreement as she considered. "Until we can find some method of working on that technology, though - perhaps through recovered craft, if we can find anything salvagable - we've got to defend this world. Our world. I'd like to extend an offer to join us."  
  
"To kill my people."  
  
"Hopefully not. Invaders, though, yes. Although you wouldn't have to be involved with that directly. In an advisory position, perhaps. As part of our research staff...?"  
  
Sefeliim shook her head. "I'm a sociologist. I'm not very good with machinery and technology."  
  
"We can find some position for you." Harrison shrugged again. "You'd also be looking for non-terrestrial allies for us. We can't hope to stand against these forces forever. We've got some big guns in the works, but until we can get them delivered... well, we still need our fourth hangar to house the Su-73X 'Heavylifter' when it arrives to be able to cart these vehicles around. But we still need some kind of advanced technology. Our MP5s may not be the best weapon against alien invaders. We need to fire on average six rounds into the cranium of an alien to put one down. Their... super-heated plasma weapons can severely wound, or even kill, one of our armoured troops in one shot. Which isn't good for our troops."  
  
"No, I can guess not," Sefeliim agreed. "I've been out of it for sixty-four million years, though, remember, so most of the races I'd know about would long be gone."  
  
"You'd be the better one to contact anyone, though."  
  
"Do you have a handy hyper... no, no, you wouldn't." Sefeliim sighed. "Oh well. I can broadcast on wavelengths of the radio spectrum, I'm sure, that'll get a response from someone... at some point..."  
  
"That's all we can-"  
  
******  
  
A screaming alarm siren cut Lefont off in the middle of his sentence. The lighting in the command centre, already dim, shifted towards the red spectrum, universal... well, global... sign for an alert situation. Several doors around the command centre opened moments later, staff rushing to their stations to checking through routines and subroutines ina ccordance with X-Com directives.  
  
The Geoscape, the massive global view of the Earth on the wall, updated immediately. An arrow zoomed down toward the planet, showing the insertion route of a UFO. A few taps on his control console brought up a small window to one side of the global view, registering the ship as a large cross configuration. Standard crew complement of twelve, thirty-two metres across, lower and upper hull slightly raised into a star-shaped pyramid. Internal systems were mostly a mystery to X-Com researchers, though. The only one recovered thus far was sitting down here, in a specially constructed storeroom, the internal structure gutted by an adapted AMRAAM 'Avalanche' missile. Course and speed were also shown, updating second by second as orbiting satellites calculated and recalculated from pin-point laser measurements.  
  
Lefont turned and lifted his head to the Operations Officer, Thom Sverson. "Give Badger the go-ahead for launch."  
  
Sverson nodded, and held his head-mounted microphone closer to his mouth. "Badger, you are go for intercept."  
  
"Affirmative," came the reply.  
  
"Get me a projected landing site for that craft!" Lefont threw towards the Tactical Operations Manager. Then, to Navigation and Detection, "What countries is that thing going to fly over?"  
  
"Um... judging on its current trajectory, Spain, France, and the southern tip of England. Based on previous incursions, it'll likely bounce upwards into orbit then and dock."  
  
"Direct Badger to the projected inbound flight path of this thing. I want him on his six and in firing range ASAP."  
  
Sefeliim stepped back, listening, watching with interest. How people reacted in situations, that was her function. Her old job. Not any longer, perhaps, but she'd always been interested in how and why people acted the ways they did. This was no different.  
  
Minutes ticked by, as reports came in from the various stations around the command centre about readiness for the expected excursion by X-Com personnel to secure the crash or landing site. Sefeliim found herself torn between hoping that it would be a landing site, and hoping it would be a crash site. She had to start thinking that these were no longer her people, no longer stood what they had once stood for.  
  
OpOff finally called down from above. "Su-61X is ready for departure. Loaded and equipped."  
  
"Hold launch until we reach the landing pad," Lefont said, indicating Sefeliim follow him. She did so, leaving the command centre behind and travelling along a series of corridors to one of the massive hangar bays. Inside was one of the huge Sukhoi VTOL transports she'd been brought to the base on.  
  
Likely, it was the only one currently in existance. Lefont knew there were more being constructed specially in the Russian states, but didn't know when they'd be available. The rear of the craft was closing, the bay doors lifting into their airtight flight position. The troops already had to be inside, Lefont guessed. Only the forward crew/passenger loading ramp remained open, and Lefont and Sefeliim entered the plane via that entrance before it too was closed.  
  
Lefont showed her how to belt herself into her chair, and wrapped some crash webbing around her, also. "It can be a bumpy ride," he offered with something approaching a smile. He leaned forward into the cockpit, spoke to the pilot. "Lift off when OpOff gives us clearance."  
  
"Launch doors are opening, sir," the pilot replied, while flicking switches to the ON position as above them, massive doors dropped into the ground and slid back under cover, allowing the specially-modified Sukhoi jet to rotate its wings and launch vertically.  
  
The plane trembled and rattled as it launched. Sefeliim glanced nervously over at Lefont. "Are your vessels always this prone to falling apart by themselves?" she asked, a little nervous.  
  
Lefont guessed she wanted reassurance. He grinned back at her. "Usually we have the bugs worked out. But this is the prototype model. You know, pretty basic." She hesitated before nodding in reply. He reached into a compartment next to him, pulled out a modified automatic pistol. It looked light to Sefeliim, compared to the MP5 rifles she'd seen earlier. "Here," Lefont said, leaning over and dumping the gun in her lap. "Use this to protect yourself if you have to."  
  
She looked up at him in panic. "You trust me with this?"  
  
"Rubber bullets. Won't kill anyone, but they'll give them one hell of a headache." Lefont was careful not to even think that at close range, they'd kill a man. "You may need it. It's regulation on these ships. We don't know if anyone... well, anyTHING'll try to get aboard while we're grounded." He toggled a switch in his arm rest as the plane's motion went from vertical lifting to horizontally forward flight at speed. "Now, excuse me while I patch into the command circuit."  
  
"Badger, can you confirm kill?"  
  
"Bandit down," came the reply. "AMRAAM right up the hiney. He's down for the count."  
  
"Is the ship recoverable?" Lefont asked into a headset.  
  
"That's an affirmative," Badger said after a few moments for circling at a lower speed. "Bandit is down, toys are comin' out to play."  
  
Good, that's good, Lefont thought to himself. There was a pause. Then -  
  
"Shit."  
  
"Badger? Repeat that?"  
  
"There's different types of toys in the toybox, FCom."  
  
"Say again, Badger?" came Fighter Command.  
  
"I said there's different types of toys in the toybox! Not what I was expecting, anyway. I gotta burn outta here. Those popguns can hurt me badly if they can hit me."  
  
"Different toys?" Sefeliim asked. "Different aliens?"  
  
"It would seem so," Lefont mused, thinking, 'what the hell are we getting into here?'  
  
  
  
  
To Be Continued... 


	3. XCom 3

DISCLAIMER: Relatively standard stuff. Existing character types (specifically the alien races), certain vehicles and buildings, and so forth are properties of Microprose. As the characters are original, the characters are my property, and so's the story (but plot for events belongs to Microprose), hence ownership and copyright of them belongs to me. Contact me at domino@netaccess.com.au if you want permission to use anything I've written for whatnot purposes.  
  
  
X-COM:  
Enemy Unknown  
  
by  
  
Raymond Cooper  
  
  
** Giants in the Playground **  
  
  
  
The Snakeman raised itself to strike, neck muscles cording and popping from the shoulders of the beast to form a large fan. The mouth opened, showing twin pairs of sharp fangs. Sefeliim recognised monomolecular tracery lining them - advanced nanotechnology that could carry a huge electric shock.  
  
Thus it was no wonder Harrison Lefont lay on the deck of the modified Sukhoi jet, rolled into a foetal ball, clutching at an arm. Sefeliim didn't think the shock would be fatal, after all, from what Harrison had said previously, the invading aliens were more interested in abducting humans. For what reason, Sefeliim didn't know, and neither did her human hosts.  
  
The pistol, held outstretched in her fingers, felt wrong to her. The plastic and metal grip shifted uneasily as she adjusted for the height the Snakeman was gaining as it rose to full height. She knew, a moment or two more, and it would strike, knowing that she would not fire at it.  
  
She just couldn't. That wasn't what her people were like at all. Non-lethal in self-defence, perhaps, but at this distance, no matter what Harrison had told her, she KNEW the rubber bullets in the clip would either have no effect on the creature rearing before her, or would kill it.  
  
It all depended on how armoured the creature was.  
  
The body armour it wore only protected the chest cavity, although it wore something of a modified helmet... it looked almost like one of the vacuum suit helmets from T'leth, used when EVAs were needed to repair damage from travel on the exterior of the ship's hull, but stretched out to fit the skull of the Snakeman as if it hadn't been smart enough to make it's own variety.  
  
There. It paused as high as it could go, and would now swoop, of that Sefeliim knew. She could see into its brain. Urgent, primitive impulses... and technology. She frowned, inside, wondering what technology should be doing in the brain of a creature such as this. Then, all within an eyeblink, she placed together that information with the tracery on the fangs - and knew, without doubt, this wasn't natural.  
  
These Snakemen were too stupid to be advanced soldiers, capable of crossing the massed voids between stars and forming an economical base large enough to support such a venture. Just too stupid. All the intelligence the beasts had shown was artificial. Implanted. Directed. As such, it would be hard for her to control, since the operator on the other end no doubt would notice one of its troops had gone wrong, and would correct it. Technology was just too difficult to manipulate mentally.  
  
But she gave it a try, anyway.  
  
Veins on the backs of her wrists strained, a pulse thumped visibly in her temple as she forced her will into the tiny brain of the creature standing ready to strike. She grabbed hold of it, wrapped tendrils of thought and imagination around it, tensed, twisted, wrestled control from it. On the floor, Lefont stirred, and rolled onto his back, weapon held aross his chest limply.  
  
But his strength was fast returning.  
  
The Snakeman saw that from the corner of a slitted eye, and a backup program surprised Sefeliim as defence code surged into the creature's forelobe. Neural impulses were triggered that she couldn't stop. The creature raised his gun, stubby finger tensing on the plasma rifle's trigger.  
  
Sefeliim couldn't stop it from pulling the trigger. All she could do was speed his motion up.  
  
The plasma blast seared into the floor barely half a metre from Lefont, the incredible heat singing an eyebrow and snapping him into action faster. He raised his pistol, and pumped a clip of bullets into the underside of the creature's jaw.  
  
Released from her mental grip of the Snakeman as its brain erupted when a lucky shot penetrated the thick hide, Sefeliim slumped to the decking, gasping as her blood pressure returned to normal.  
  
Momentarily, she glanced up at Harrison, mouth open as she sucked in air. He was propped up on an elbow, grinning, soot smudging where his left eyebrow previously existed. "Miss me?" he asked, before rolling onto his back once more and chuckling.  
  
******  
  
The operation had gone much as expected, Lefont found once he was able once more to stand. His troopers, organised into three units of four soldiers, had proceeded at pace into the growing darkness in the rural district. As far as motion sensors had been able to tell the team before exiting the Skyranger, there were eight aliens in the immediate vicinity. And while the team leaders had once more bemoaned the fact that the US Army had yet to outfit them with the promised handheld motion sensor units, once outside the Skyranger, it was easy to tell where the Xenos were: they made way too much noise for any kind of stealth to have hidden them.  
  
DeFries, the Austrian in charge of Alpha Unit, had taken his troops through two crop fields low, each two-man element in his squad moving up a dozen metres, then laying low to cover the other element as they took point. Leap-frogging in this manner brought them quickly within site of a farmhouse, smoking, and showing signs of a forced entry. The smashes from within of crockery and glass suggested the xenos were searching for something: maybe electrical componants to try to repair their vessel. DeFries brought one element up behind the house, waited, threw a flashbang in the front door at the same time Element Two tossed one in through the back. Sounds of a massive disoriented creature abounded within, and both elements burst into the farmhouse, taking down two very surprised massive monopodial snake-like things. One of DeFries' junior Squaddies described it as a "Snake-Man", and the name stuck for the other teams.  
  
It had been at this point that the lone Snakeman had rushed the Skyranger, from a direction its externally-mounted weapons couldn't touch. It had been killed as Beta Unit was moving towards an orchard.  
  
DeFries was lucky. He didn't lose anyone; in his after-action report, he would later describe the xenos as nothing more than unarmed technicians - neither were armed.  
  
Beta Unit, commanded by Karl Williams, wasn't so lucky. Their chosen direction led right into a group of these Snakemen that had cornered the family that owned the farm, grouped in a small fruit orchard. They jabbered in French. Williams couldn't understand them - coming from the United States of America, he hadn't had much need to understand languages other than English. Topres, a native French speaker from the South Pacific, gave Williams a running commentary.  
  
Basically, the farmer was pleading that at least his children should be allowed to live, even if he and his wife were to be killed. The xenos didn't speak, just indicated again with their thin rifles that the farmer's family should gather up closer to one another. It didn't take a genius to realise what the xeno was doing - gathering them into a corralled area where none could escape once the unit's commander gave the order to fire.  
  
Lefont had heard the hisses of the xeno squad leader directing his troops about over the comms. Sefeliim, reaching out with her mind, saw through the viewpoint of one of the X-Com troopers there, and told Lefont that rather than being some kind of language, it was more the physical gestures that were the language of choice. The hissing was more just a reflex respiratory action of the creature. She quickly explained her newly acquired knowledge of the Snakemen's control system, and guessed that whatever control the operator had over its, "Well," she said, "Victim," was limited to physical movements and nothing so fine as forcing something that likely couldn't talk to carry out intelligent speech.  
  
A twig snapped on the comms: one of the X-Com troops had shifted slightly to relieve a cramp, which had broken a twig he'd unwittingly been standing on. In the mostly silent night, the sound was almost like a gunshot.  
  
And at that point, the sounds of weaponsfire from Alpha Unit echoed through the night air.  
  
The Snakemen troops turned and fired into the night, while the squad leader calmly and coldly gunned down the family. Startled, the X-Com troops returned fire with the soft stuttering silenced MP5s produced. Cloaked at first by the darkness, the flurescent green lighting cast from the Snakeman weapons lit up the orchard and showed the xenos where the human troopers were.  
  
Kevlar armour had long been known to give only absolute minimal protection to whatever ammunition was being used by these xenos, and once again, it proved to be little more than tissue paper. Sefeliim gave a short scream and toppled over as the troop she'd been using as eyes had his chest blasted out through his spine. The comms came alive as Delta Unit moved forward to take it's objective under the covering sounds of combat from the orchard, and stormed the alien craft's main hatch.  
  
A second troop from Beta went down with a smoking ruin below her right elbow. The wound was cauterised, and thanks to adrenylin and shock, she couldn't yet feel the injury, but she screamed anyway, dropped the weapon in her left hand and clutched at her stump. Standing bolt upright to flee, a pair of shots zeroed in on her with unerring accuracy, and sliced the top half of her body from the bottom.  
  
She toppled into two pieces, still screaming.  
  
Topres returned fire, picking his targets, but realising that the hides of these creatures were too strong for anything but perhaps a lucky shot. Noting the family were now dead, and knowing that unless someone acted or God Himself started tossing around lightning bolts, the remains of Beta would soon be dead, too, he grabbed a grenade from his belt. He yanked the pin free, and tossed it in a high arc, above the tree in front of him, out of sight of the xenos, hitting the ground in the middle of the Snakeman formation. A moment later, it exploded in a pyrotechnic extravagansa of flame and shrapnel.  
  
Pieces of metal whizzed past Topres, and two small pieces lodged in a bicep, but he refused to let that hinder him. Even if the weapon didn't kill the alien soldiers, it gave him a few moments of confusion in their ranks to find his unit commander.  
  
Williams lay on his back, staring at the sky, when Topres found him. One of the first shots from the xenos had seared through his armour and removed part of his pelvis and flash-fried local organs. Definitely a serious injury.  
  
As the smoke cleared, Topres glanced back at the newly-created clearing. Nothing moved. He tossed another grenade into the middle of the now-prone Snakeman formation, just to be sure. He also called for a medical team to hit the ground and get to his location fast as they could.  
  
Inside the UFO, Delta's commander, Hiro Yamazaki, found himself confronted with twin corridors, each leading off in opposite directions. He divided his unit up into two two-man elements, designated Red and Blue, and sent each off down a corridor.  
  
They leap-frogged around corners until they reached doors. Yamazaki and the others knew from experience and knowledge gained from prior missions that the doors would open automatically if someone touched them, so one member of the element stood to one side of the door, the other on the other, and then one would slap the door and retracted their hand while the other element member went low around the door, weapon already up and finger with just a scant less pressure on the trigger than needed to fire the weapon.  
  
In what they assumed was a forward command centre, judging by the banks of what appeared to be complex computing equipment, they found one final xeno: their typical Grey. Yamazaki's partner shot the unarmed Grey, while Blue Element burst into a central room, which contained a glowing fountain of energy.  
  
Or rather, would have, Sefeliim confirmed later when she was allowed near the retreived saucer. It was a reactor of some kind, that she knew. And it should have had a golden shower of energetic particles dancing within a magnetic containment field: power enough to tear asunder spacetime and send a small vessel through, had it the equipment. Sefeliim, though, not being an engineer, couldn't help much more than that, she conceeded with an apologetic shrug.  
  
But now, the column was very quiet. There were few sparkles, no glow, the magnetic field snapping and hissing as the reactor's back-up barely generated enough power to protect the crew from any possible deadly radiation spikes or explosions from within the reactor core. Again, this was something not known at the time, and was only mentioned in passing on page 13 of the researchers' initial report on the dissection of the discoid vessel back at X-Com: Base Europa. It would yet cause some consternation among the new recruits, and generate some discussion on including science personnel with each unit of troops in the field, an improbable action, as senior officers already knew.  
  
Lefont sighed, moved back from the situation board in the modified Sukhoi's temporary mobile command centre, and glanced over at Sefeliim. She was trailing her fingers very lightly over the punctured skull of the Snakeman, probing around skeletal features and dipping into exit and entry wounds to examine the insides of the creature. She appeared to be frowning, but Lefont was already guessing he couldn't accept her body language at face value - hell, she was a bloody alien, how could he! - but she did seem to do what she did to project her feelings and communicate on that silent level every living creature did to other members of its species. He guessed he was the target she was working from, seeing as she was telepathic, and he had thus far been the closest to her at nearly all times.  
  
Occasionally, she'd flex a thumb, and momentarily become entranced in the range of motion it had. After the third or fourth time of watching her play with body parts she apparently had never had before, he leaned over and asked, "Any information on... whatever this is?"  
  
"I do not know. I have never seen anything like it," she admitted, standing herself and wiping her hands on a nearby seat: Lefont guessed Lieutenant Yamazaki would stand there, stare at the stain, then go sit back in the rear crew section. "It resembles... well, you think it is a snake, so do your troops. But... it is been adapted."  
  
"How so?"  
  
Sefeliim stroked a finger over the fangs. "Monomolecular filaments. Cybernetic monopodal compression packs. Advanced bioware and techware systems attached to and grown in the brain. Stimulated muscular growth in the upper limbic system."  
  
"They made it's deep brain muscles stronger?" Lefont asked, confused.  
  
Sefeliim turned around. "Limbic is not derived from the word limb? Interesting. And weird. For my people, the word chaa'kaa denotes a similar meaning to the term limb, and chaa'ka means 'of the limbs'... sort of... well, 'limbic'. I didn't realise that was a word taken already." She closed her eyes for a moment, muttered to herself, "Limbic system... system of interconnected deep brain structures common to all mammals and dealing with emotive, sensory and autonomic functions..." before shaking her head and adding, "I mean its arms. They have been hyperstimulated through... well... I would say some kind of drug therapy."  
  
"How can you tell?"  
  
She pointed to various puncture marks on the underside of an arm, where they wouldn't show in the normal range of movement one would expect such a creature to make. "These are deep, and there are varying ages of the marks... this seems to be old, the scarring suggests it has had time to heal over - although the skin is reasonably fresh - while this mark seems to have been made within the last twelve hours. I would assume this species grows rapidly, and thus the chemical process would perhaps simply be aimed at enhancing the expanding musculature, perhaps by convincing the body it has yet to achieve maturity."  
  
"Are you sure you're not a scientist of some kind?" Lefont asked, almost suspiciously.  
  
The disguised alien nodded. "I *am* a scientist, remember? Sociology, or my equivalent of that more simplified branch of yours, is a science, too. And while I am not well-versed in many of the sciences my people studied, and only know of military actions through both historical records of my people and witnessing other species bring destruction on their own heads or on those of others, I am minorly proficient in most areas. It is... it *was* expected of members of the Upper Primary Staff of T'leth."  
  
"Upper Primary being something like a command-level position?" Lefont interjected.  
  
Sefeliim nodded. "Indeed it is. Although the positions can sometimes be hereditary, I earned my position through hard study and manual work studying the sociological structures of the peoples we encountered while travelling on T'leth. But that is another matter."  
  
"Yeah. So apart from that, there's nothing you can tell us?" Lefont watched Sefeliim shake her head.  
  
"Well, nothing apart from the fact it has someone physically manipulating its brain structures from a distant location."  
  
"What?"  
  
Sefeliim rooted about for a phrase in Lefont's mind that he'd recognise, feeling a little on-edge for doing so. "It was being 'radio controlled', Harrison."  
  
******  
  
The flight back to Base Europa was quiet and uneventful. Yamazaki had indeed retired to the crew section, assisted them with cataloguing the basic appearance of loose weapons and equipment collected from the combat zone and placing them in appropriate bins for storage and easy transportation.  
  
Beside Sefeliim, Harrison pondered deep thoughts, staring aimlessly out his porthole, the armoured shutters having retracted once more to allow an external view from the command deck. She peered at him as he thought, wondering what was going on in his mind. Had she been on her own world, among her own people, she'd simply have glanced into his brain, seen what she wanted to know, and went back to her own life. But knowing these humans liked their mental privacy - heck, those she'd done some discreet mental checking on found the idea anathema to their way of life and would likely have killed her had they known she was in their minds - meant she had to stop peeking, stop acting like a member of her race, cool down the superhuman abilities and become their definition of 'normal'.  
  
It was going to be scary for her. She'd studied many other species, some of then even sentient, but never one as advanced and as closed off as this. More advanced, yes, but those peoples had usually already forsaken privacy and continued to develop mental-linkage devices that allowed a people to become almost as one in mind. The lack of privacy was a great boon: it destroyed crime, it lessened the effects of criminal intent, it increased the moral strength of a people, and allowed research, development and engineering strategems to be carried out on a much faster scale.  
  
She thought back to the homeworld of the Skraaall, tall, thin beings who had long-since lost the power of speech. More developed as a race than her own, the Skraaall had been even more pacifistic than her people. While hers had been pacifists, they knew the need still existed occasionally when diplomacy could not hold back an enemy any longer, and thus non-lethal methods would need to be used to protect the lives of those on their colony worlds and space-faring vessels.  
  
Yet the Skaaall had no need even for that.  
  
It could be argued that in their younger millennia, the Skaaall had developed defensive technologies that were still in place - expanding bubble field generators that would simply seal anyone with dangerous thoughts in an invulnerable bubble, where they would stay until they were able to explain the reason for the thought, or died - and thus had no need to get even non-lethal; the bubble generators were sentient, and a race unto themselves, no longer under the control of the Skaaall.  
  
But even on worlds where the bubble generators did not exist, the Skaaall were safe from predations and violence. While their technology was coveted by many, any invasions on undefended worlds succeeded. And therein lay the Skaaall's victory.  
  
They had nothing. Not technology, as others would recognise it. The technology was integral to themselves and their worlds, and had acchieved a symbiosis with their holdings. So long as everything continued normally, things went fine. Skaaall were born, they lived, they died. The planets suffered winters, bloomed and grew through summers, as any normal planet.  
  
But an invasion fleet changed things.  
  
Ships landed, troops killed Skaaall. And as members of the Skaaall died, the planets reacted. Atmospheric percentages altered, became unbreathable to the invaders. Foodstuffs became infected with microbial lifeforms that were infinitely adaptable to anything the invaders might try to kill them with, and killed more invaders. Storm activity selectively blew down invader buildings and vessels, lightning seemed more attracted to the invaders than the local populace. And the more Skaaall were killed or injured, the worse conditions on the planet became.  
  
Although the Skaaall weren't affected. Tied into their worlds as they were, they were mostly protected.  
  
It didn't take long for the galactic community to realise the efefct of killing Skaaall while invading one of their worlds. So a non-lethal, non-injurious method was attempted. But being unable to threaten the populace for fear or turning the planet itself against their forces, the invaders were forced to let the Skaaall go about their daily business - which they did, regardless. Any attempts to halt them from entering buildings or leaving settlements led to them still pushing to get through - not being aggressive, just continuing to walk in that direction. And pushing them away, trying to halt them from doing something, could injure or kill a Skaaall - being so fragile, it was more likely to kill them.  
  
And so, after a few months of ruling over a planet that ignored them, of ruling a planet that had yet to acknowledge they'd even landed, the invaders would leave, not having found any secret advanced technology to pay for the incursion.  
  
Not even any non-secret technology - the Skaaall technology was as symbiotic to the planets as the Skaaall were, and removing them from the environs of the Skaaall led to the technology "dying" in most spectacular methods.  
  
Sefeliim reflected on the fact that previously, her people had enjoyed an amicable trading agreement with the Skaaall. Now, from what little she'd seen in people's minds before she didn't want to see anything more, her people were more likely to try invading the worlds of the Skaaall. That just wouldn't be good, for anyone involved. T'leth's molecular control technologies, combined with the vast metafusion generators powering the massive beast, would be more than capable of turning any planet into free-floating atoms in the void.  
  
If, that was, T'leth was still capable of flight, was still in one piece... and could be found.  
  
Perhaps that was the real danger that started to cloud behind her eyes at that moment. Perhaps it wasn't that, but later, that was the thought that seemed to Sefeliim to have set everything off within her, the changes that would take her to the endgame. That the thought of the peaceful colonial research vessel, the immense worldship that she'd been a part of making happen, that she'd been a very integral part of... could possibly be the whole point of this invasion, this perversion of her race.  
  
Perhaps.  
  
But she'd always wonder, forever after, if she and her people weren't as pacifistic as she'd always believed. And that the massed invasion of the universe by her people was something preordained long before she was born.  
  
Not exactly something she could easily live with.  
  
  
  
To Be Continued... 


	4. XCom 4

DISCLAIMER: Relatively standard stuff. Existing character types (specifically the alien races), certain vehicles and buildings, and so forth are properties of Microprose. As the characters are original, the characters are my property, and so's the story (but plot for events belongs to Microprose), hence ownership and copyright of them belongs to me. Contact me at domino@netaccess.com.au if you want permission to use anything I've written for whatnot purposes.  
  
NOTE: This chapter has some bad language used.  
  
  
X-COM:  
Enemy Unknown  
  
by  
  
Raymond Cooper  
  
  
** Subatomic Genie **  
  
  
  
"It's some kind of natural element, Commander, but more than that I can't say."  
  
Harry Levalle straightened from where he had been leaned over a reinforced glass tube holding a fragment of the substance found in the reactor core of a recently crashed alien craft. Commander Lefont stood behind him, slightly to the side, so he too could see the orange material. It appeared to glow, but that couldn't be right. Perhaps it was just reflection of light off the crystaline surface.  
  
"Natural? And you can't identify it?"  
  
"It shows no signs of being manufactured, only machined through refining... much as we refine and shape uranium to be used in reactors. THere's no signs of tampering with the physical makeup of the material. I'd guess it's a new element, something that we either haven't yet found on Earth or the moon, or something not native to this solar system."  
  
"Something... from far, far away, then?"  
  
"I'd say so."  
  
Lefont stepped closer to the tube. "Is there... anything we could use it for?"  
  
"Using alien weapons, that might be possible. Ah, but why would we use their power source?"  
  
"It could -"  
  
"Yes, it could be a great advance for our generation systems, but if its not native to here, we can't get more. As well as that, it could be years before we can figure out how to utilise the energies it holds."  
  
"A radioactive element?" Lefont asked.  
  
"Definitely."  
  
Lefont stepped back. "But not dangerous... by itself," Levalle added. "Apparently, it only gets excited when energy is passed into it."  
  
"So... you need to power it to get power back?"  
  
"Think of it... as an amplification crystal. You can feed a tiny amount of power into it, and it will return that a hundred-fold, perhaps even thousand-fold. We can't really test it too well, with most of our budget and resources being used to examine the other artefacts you bring back."  
  
"Ahh..."  
  
"You don't understand, do you?" the scientists asked, a little amused. He leaned back against the bench, patted the tube. "If we ever get any kind of budget, and some more researchers, I'd like to get them to work on this. We might not have a use for it right now... but who knows where we'll be in five years... or even five months?"  
  
"Yeah," Lefont noted. He made a mental note to check the budget once again. It might be tight, but the research they were carrying out here could save lives.  
  
In the few days since the shot-down UFO had been recovered and returned to Europa, the base's few scientists had been drooling like little kids over the devices contained within. Most had picked out a piece of technology they wanted to research, and were busy providing preliminary research details so Lefont could assign work details for the science staff. Each was hoping their own would be the device that would be picked for the next primary research project.  
  
"On a different note, how did the autopsy go?"  
  
Levalle walked across the room, grabbed a clipboard, and flipped through several pages of information. "It went... slowly. The epidermis - the skin - was extremely tough, and resisted our scalpels when we tried to cut into it. We had that problem with all the recovered corpses, actually, so it wasn't just a fluke with the one. This, uh, 'Snakeman', was only marginally a male. While it could lay eggs, it actually produces them and fertilises them by itself, the aspects we would, ah, normally look at in a life form suggests the creature has more masculine aspects than feminine."  
  
"Interesting, but useless."  
  
"Each Snakeman carries within it at least fifty eggs. Already fertilised. And apparently, the ability to bring new eggs to be ready to lay within hours. Left unchecked here on Earth, they'd be a major threat within a month. An ecological disaster. Um," Levalle checked his clipboard again. "The epidermal layer is also heat resistant, so using incindery weapons on them isn't advised except as a last resort. I'd suggest perhaps armour piercing - they might have the added punch to breach the flesh. There was an extensive muscular system within the creature - it's a monopod, and it needs some hefty muscles to move about. Also, the upper limb regions are highly developed, and the creature is almost freakishly strong. Do not attempt, ah, to arm wrestle them."  
  
"And the brain?"  
  
"As you suggested, the neurological centres were very underdeveloped. The brain as a whole is suggestive of a much lower lifeform than was evidenced... it shouldn't have been able to pull the triggers on those guns, let along find it. Ah, that problem seemed to have been made a moot point by the fact that all subjects had an integrated network of... well, computers. Beyond our current level of understanding, although our hardware specialists are looking at it in their spare time. It does seem to be, as you suggested, a radio control network of some kind. Short-ranged. Probably. I don't know how anyone could get around the problems of transmitting a signal faster than light, so for reactions to be within acceptable parameters, the controller would have had to have been reasonably local."  
  
"Around or on the moon?"  
  
"The three second or so time delay there would be death to a solider on the battlefield. I'd suggest perhaps even low-Earth orbit."  
  
Lefont nodded. "Thanks."  
  
"We're starting on those bug-eyed freaks later today, if you're interested...?" Levalle asked.  
  
"No, thanks, but no. I've sat through enough Grey autopsies to be able to point out to doctors what organs do what job."  
  
"Heh. Okay, but, ah, the invitation stands."  
  
"Thanks." Lefont left the room.  
  
******  
  
Sefeliim sat in her quarters, watching local television. She enjoyed watching Coronation Street and Neighbours, things that some of the local staff watched from time to time. They were... soaps, she'd heard them referred to. Continual dramas in which characters continued from episode to episode, with long-term storylines and eventual characterisation. Theyw ere interesting, not so much for the stories, or for the characters, but for the fashions the people used, the slang they spoke, the body language they displayed. Being for as wide an audience as they were, she could watch the macrocosm of human civilisation in microcosm in an afternoon of television.  
  
As a sociologist, she found that important. As someone from not here, and having no idea what was done here in this day and age - heck, only a few days earlier, she'd seen giant warm-blooded reptiles swarm the surface of this world - having a way of catching up fast without invading the privacy of a non-telepathic race's mind was so much more important to her.  
  
She'd been given a room of her own, in case her form slipped or someone through other means found out what she was and reacted the wrong way - heck, Sefeliim expected them to react the wrong way. How could they not? Apparently, the only way they'd ever met non-terrestrial species on this planet were when they were under attack. So why would the dominant lifeform expect anything positive from having an alien in an anti-alien facility? Regardless, it gave her somewhere to relax, to be herself, lock her thoughts away from the loud thoughts of the humans in the base.  
  
While they weren't telepathic, Sefeliim found humans' minds to be extremely loud and projecting. Emotional extremes especially came across well to her.  
  
Coronation Street had just finished, and she turned her television over to CNN Worldwide. Nothing new in the world. Well, that was the basic mindset of the base's human population. But to Sefeliim, she watched everything as a suggestion of the whole. Minor bombings in Israel, peacetalks continuing between the governments there. Rumours of another tradgedy in Bosnia. Lightning storm in Spain causing floods. Mudslide in Central American nation kills seventeen, another forty feared dead. New research into stem cells. A mouse has been developed that can grow a human ear on its back. The Japanese have developed a fully-functioning car, complete with internal combustion engine, smaller than the eye can see.  
  
Wow. A race on the brink of great things. Still in a tumultuous childhood, but about to blossom into adolescence. Perhaps. And agressive alien races... well, that was just like a parent hitting a child every day. The child more often than not wouldn't turn out quite right. Suspicious of others, or going about hitting others.  
  
So Sefeliim decided, there and then, she had to present a nicer, more human face to the local populace. Let them know not all peoples from other planets were evil scum that deserved a brutal kicking in the armpits. No, she corrected herself, with humans, it's kicking in the crotch.  
  
And perhaps, if she could do that, then humans wouldn't feel the need to act like that to all other races they met when they finally hit the stars.  
  
Oh well. It was a dream. Sixty-five million Earth years old, too. Perhaps things in the galaxy had changed in that time. While there had always been less-than-altrustic races out there - some downright agressive - the majority had been relatively nice, easy-going peoples. But now... perhaps not. Unless Sefeliim's suspicions were correct...  
  
Her train of thought was derailed when her door knocked. Someone outside. She resisted the instant urge to give them a mental invite, stood, straightened her shirt, and opened the door. Sylvia Anderson, a young, petite English girl attached to Elite Shift, stood there. She smiled, and gestured with a hand towards the mess room further down the corridor.  
  
"We're having something of a party for Topres. It was his birthday two days ago, we only found out this morning when someone got a look at his jacket," Sylvia gushed in explanation. By now, Sefeliim knew enough military slang to know that she didn't mean an article of clothing, which would have been confusing, but his military record. "You coming?"  
  
"Mmm, yeah," Sefeliim decided on the spot. She was trying to keep away from the troopers, but she guessed becoming friends with them was both a step towards eventual trust among them whenever her secret became not-so-secret - she hoped - and would also serve as another aspect to her continuing research of other species. She quickly gathered an X-Com base jacket in case she found it cold - some of the troops came from weirdly cold environments, especially the ex-GRU troops - and closed the door, allowing herself to be pulled along by the ex-MI6 operative into the mess room.  
  
******  
  
She found herself sitting at the corner of one of the tables, two conversations going on either side of her. Topres had been completely flummoxed by the party, he hadn't been expecting it. Apparently, he'd tried to hide his birthdate to avoid just this kind of event. Weird. Sefeliim suspected that had something to do with his age.  
  
Sylvia had been the first of the base women to plant a kiss on his cheek, and had danced away seductively afterwards. She kept glancing at him from the corner of her eyes as the night passed, and Sefeliim wondered just how often whirlwind relationships blew up around here. She felt she was watching the start of one right now. Something to keep on eye on, definitely. Human mating rituals seemed to be so intricate on television, and yet so simple. The flutter of one's eyes, then fluttering curtains and some on-going sighing and yelling from all participants involved.  
  
Bill Dawson next to her said something, for the second time, apparently, but Sefeliim had to turn around and ask him to repeat himself again to get it.  
  
"What do you do down here?"  
  
Oh. That was a good one. "I assist Harrison."  
  
"The Commander? Ha! He don't need no assisting! Go on, what do you really do?"  
  
Think think think, I've got a brain twice the size of his, think... "I really do assist him." Inspiration struck. "I'm a government researcher with some knowledge in these areas."  
  
"Ah, part of the Kiryu-Kai, eh? How'd you guys do so badly?"  
  
The Kuryu-Kai? Sefeliim thought for a moment, brought up the correct information in her head, and examined it. The Kuryu-Kai, a Japanese-organised attempt to bring down UFOs and stop this attempted alien invasion of Earth. Their vessels and weapons had been designed and manufactured in Japan, and hadn't performed nearly as well as the modified Sukhois and Lockheed-Martin jets X-Com had been given at cheaper-than-manufacturing costs, and eventually, after five months of complete and utter failure to down a single alien craft, had been disbanded. Harrison Lefont had managed to scoop up some of the troops and researchers involved in the Kiryu-Kai for X-Com, and had learnt his lessons well from reading the reports of the staff involved in Japan. And right now, she knew, Harrison was attempting to bring the remnants of the Kiryu-Kai directly under X-Com jurisdiction. But it would depend on how talks that would soon be continuing in person would go. And of course, she'd been told this in confidence, and just nodded.  
  
"We sucked," was all she added for explanation. Dawson apparently thought that was okay.  
  
"You know, what you guys did wrong was, hey, you didn't shoot the bastards down," he said, with appropriate hand gestures to show that apparently, jets did nothing but skim around one another and knock over a glass of some kind of yeast... oh, Sefeliim realised, beer. "And to do that, you know, you got to do whole weird things. Like fly? And track them? And have guns on your planes? Shit, the JSDF can't do shit." He stifled a burp with a big hand. Sefeliim started inching away from him, wondering if she could interject into another conversation.  
  
But Dawson didn't give her the chance. "But hey, you're a pretty thing. Why'd you go into shooting aliens and stuff? I mean, come on, you should be, I don't know, in photos or porn, you know?"  
  
"Porn?" That came out somewhat disbelievingly from Sylvia, who'd overheard that last and came to rescue her new friend.  
  
"I mean that really classy porn, like... you know what I mean," Dawson said, hands up in front of him in a semi-defensive posture. "Like that Tera Patrick chick does, or, whatshername, the blond one, Jenna Jameson. That kind of classy."  
  
"Riiiight," Sylvia folded her arms, an eyebrow cocked. "You mean where the woman's on top and faking it." She wiggled her eyebrows at Sefeliim. "Classy, like he said. Come on, though, I brought you down here to mingle and you're being hogged by this stud." She grabbed Sefeliim's hand, and hauled her away from her chair, plunked her down next to Topres. "Here. Cheer up Paul." And she was gone again to have words and a few elbows with Dawson.  
  
Topres turned to her, his eyelids lowered. He wasn't tired, just looked as if he was being forced to put up with things he didn't want to put up with. "So. You're Sylvia's next attempt to get me to lighten up tonight, eh?"  
  
Sefeliim shrugged. "Not really. I think she just saved my... poodle or something. Dawson's being a leech."  
  
"Lech. He's a lech. Really good at what he does with a gun and in the field, just an arrogant drunk prick outside of it."  
  
"Then why does Harrison have him here?"  
  
Topres shurgged. "No one else his size here. He's a brilliant shot with our heavy artillery, too, which the rest of us struggle with. You've seen us strugle with the miniguns? He can carry two."  
  
"Wow."  
  
"Yes. So be careful about him. It's not that he doesn't know his own strength, it's that strong people can be very dangerous when they have no inhibitions. And the military, while they'll deal with stuff after the fact, won't take steps to stop something from happening beforehand IF the person involved is useful." With that, Topres drained his glass. "I'm going to get a refill," he announced to Sefeliim, standing. She noticed Sylvia look around, and she followed him from the room.  
  
Too bad that Sefeliim couldn't follow and observe more human mating behaviour. But porn... pornography, obviously. Mating behaviours dressed up as entertainment for people apparently mating by themselves. And some people who apparently wished they were mating by themselves. Humourous, Sefeliim thought. And Dawson thought she should be doing some kind of comedy show for others? No way. That would be making a spectacle of herself, and a decent scientist never did that.  
  
Not that Sefeliim was a decent scientist, but she aspired to be one, as a member of the Upper Primary.  
  
Dawson stared at her with a slightly dazed expression from his table. She melted into another conversation, instantly entranced by the wonders of blood patterning on uniforms and methods of cleaning them out.  
  
******  
  
Four weeks had passed before there was another sign of an alien craft entering the atmosphere. It was a small one, and Sefeliim was in the command room when the Geoscape monitor spun around to a location over Spain and zoomed in. An arrow picked out the craft's trajectory, and at Lefont's nod, Thom Sverson directed an F-22 Interceptor towards it. At a range of sixty kilometres, it launched an Avalanche missile. The modified AMRAAM vectored in on the craft, and at the speeds both were travelling, the missile touched the skin of the craft within a minute and a half.  
  
The explosion ripped the side out of the disc, sent it into a hi-gravity spin, before the engine system was exposed and superheated plasmas ignited and destroyed the craft entirely. The Interceptor was returned to the hangar, and for the moment, everything was fine. The alert was stood down, the Geoscape went back to ceaseless roaming of the globe, and staff relaxed at their stations again. An hour of terror.  
  
Sefeliim turned to Lefont. "You do know that was a short ranged craft, don't you?"  
  
Lefont nodded. "Our scientists are theorising they're dropping them from a carrier in orbit somewhere, but we don't know where. Or what to look for. We only get these guys on radar because of their interactions with the atmosphere, not their aerodynamics. So how do we look for one where there is no atmosphere?"  
  
"That's something I've got some ideas on. But first, we'd need a functioning hyper-wave communicator. What I'm here to pitch research for."  
  
"yeah. You've mentioned this thing before." Lefont scratched his head. He understood the need for allies, but there were two alien races attacking Earth right now, and perhaps there were more, especially if one was controlling another one through technological means. That meant that they had technology for doing that, and could adapt it, and be controlling damned near anyone in the region. He didn't know, and calling for allies wasn't now a decision he could make by himself. "I don't know if calling for non-terrestrial allies would be a wise idea..."  
  
"No, not these days, I agree." She dropped her voice. "I realise my information and knowledge is more than a little out of date. So it's not a good idea. But the hyper-wave communicators could replace your, ah, primitive radar system. And -"  
  
"And to work with our scientists here on something so obviously advanced, you'd have to make your secret a little less of a secret. Only some of our science team know, remember? And they're probably the most open-minded and least-rabid members of the staff here in Europa."  
  
Put like that, no, Sefeliim didn't want to make her secret something more open just yet. But before she could develop a counter-argument based around interrogations of living alien prisoners, the Geoscape blasted yet another alarm. The monitor spun around and zeroed in over the UK, a huge arrow showing the projected flight path of whatever object was entering the atmosphere now. Lefont looked up to Svenson, who looked grim.  
  
"It's forward concussion wave suggests it's displacing something like eight thousand metric tonnes," he reported from information being piped to his Operations desk.  
  
"Destination?"  
  
"Somewhere in Norway." A pause. "No, wait, it's changing trajectory... Geoscape's updating now."  
  
The arrow shifted from a long, low arc over the UK and into Norway, into a short re-entry curve designed for maximum aerobraking - and less time for interception.  
  
Oh, yeah, and it was headed directly for London.  
  
  
To Be Continued?  
  
NOTES:  
  
Mmm. As the line says above, I'm not sure whether to continue with this. Far as I can tell, a whole four people have read this fic since it's been posted, and that's not too good a reason to continue with it. So, can I please ask a question? That everyone who DOES read this fic, please either review it to say so, or email me at domino@netaccess.com.au ? if enough people are enjoying this fic and just staying silent, then yeah, I'll keep posting. But if it's only a few... well, not much point continuing and I'd be better to continue with my other two current publicly-available fics instead. I'm enjoying writing this, so please don't think this is a cop-out. Just for writing something especially for public rather than personal consumption, it's nice to know it's actually being read. 


	5. XCom 5

DISCLAIMER: Relatively standard stuff. Existing character types (specifically the alien races), certain vehicles and buildings, and so forth are properties of Microprose. As the characters are original, the characters are my property, and so's the story (but plot for events belongs to Microprose), hence ownership and copyright of them belongs to me. Contact me at domino@netaccess.com.au if you want permission to use anything I've written for whatnot purposes.  
  
NOTE: This chapter has some bad language used.  
X-COM:  
Enemy Unknown  
  
by  
  
Raymond Cooper  
** Knights of the X-Com Stable **  
Colonel Harrison Lefont stood at the head of the troop complement seated in the rear of the modififed Sukhoi Skyranger VTOL, giving a last minute briefing.  
  
"I need not remind you that an eight thousand tonne ship is a big ship, and we're expecting to see a lot of aliens. Expect the usual complement of Greys -"  
  
"Sectoids," Sefeliim, holding onto a safety strap beside him, interjected.  
  
"Sectoids, thanks, and these new Snakemen, and in some numbers. Remember, they're heavily armed. Don't expect your kevlar vests and helmets to do much more than leave a nicer-looking corpse. The lesson: Don't get hit." Lefont paused for breath, watched as his troops checked their weapons and equipment. The teams had been reorganised after the last outing, again with the four-member units, broken down again into two-man elements. Each element member would cover the other's back, which wasn't a change from the previous operating tactics. But the units had been rearranged, the experienced members being paired up with rookies, trying to spread the experience of the teams around. As such, the units had been renamed, and now, there were 4 complete units on the Skyranger. Each unit was made up of two experienced members, and two rookies.  
  
Lefont checked out each soldier, making sure they were able to perform to the standard he required, before continuing. Henri Topres had been promoted to Squad Leader, and was moving between Carol Bennings, a Squaddie, and a survivor of three missions, and his two rookies, Jarud Hall (from New Zealand's Special Air Service) and Akahito Harada, technically a rookie as he was from the now-defunct Kuryu-Kai. They made up one of the two direct assault units, Hammer unit. All were armed with MP5s, with several grenades slung from their belt webbing. Their kevlar vests also protected their upper arms and their uniforms also had protective padding on their thighs. Lefont knew from experience they made it harder for the troop to run, but then, they weren't supposed to move too fast - ideally, the assault units would have time to position themselves while light units would draw the enemy back into crossfires and ambushes, set up by the assault units beforehand. It wasn't always an ideal world, though, and thus Hammer wasn't as heavily armoured as the White Knights.  
  
Bill Donovan sat with this group, oiling the barrels of his twin autocannons. Once he'd finished making sure the barrels would roll as they were supposed to, he began winding in the ammunition feeds. Donovan wasn't the leader of the White Knights - hell, he'd be useless in a command position, he'd have had everyone killed - but he was more well-known. The position of Squad Leader for White Knights fell on Monique de Salver's shoulders. She'd been brought into X-Com after one of its founding missions, when a small alien force had landed in her native Monaco and attempted to abduct a member of the Royal Family. de Salver, a policewoman seconded on bodyguard duty at the time in the palace, responded cooly and calmly, and using her police-issue 9mm pistol, had held off the alien invaders until such time as X-Com had been able to insert troops into the building. The invitation for her to join had come hours afterwards, and her initial experience with aliens had made her seriously consider the offer. She'd accepted less than a day after the attack, and had been an active member ever since. She checked her twin Desert Eagles before sliding them into holsters sewn into her uniform, did the same with her 9mm police pistol (which she'd insisted on keeping, Lefont remembered), slid a fresh clip of ammunition into her MP5, and stowed several more away on her belt. In the heavy artillery unit, de Salver was the only member armed with lighter weaponry, as a defence for the troops who had weapons that could be a danger to use in close proximity. The last two team members, Sharee Lewis (culled from the USA's ATF) and Javier Rico (a former Mexican revolutionary-turned-government soldier), were armed with portable Nimrod-2A rocket launchers. Each had several reloads in tubes strapped to their backs, so the soldier could simply reach over their shoulder, grab one, and reload without needing a partner to reload the system.  
  
However, Lefont had noticed that their firing rate was much improved when the firer had a loader to insert the new missile into the firing tube. In a pitched battle as this likely would be, those few lost moments when the soldier placed the launcher on the ground to insert the new rocket could mean the difference between surviving and... not surviving. A simple set of outcomes, nothing in between. Lefont noted in his brain to tell de Salver to assist with loading when she could.  
  
The other assault unit, Anvil, was led by Sylvia Anderson, yet another promotion. She was joined by Aleksandr Krivopusk (Russian GRU), Hiroto Suzuka (ex-Kuryu-Kai) and Damien Colston (Australian SAS). Again, this assault team was armed with the usual assortment of MP5s, grenades, and automatic pistols. Grenades also hung from belt webbing, and like all Squad Leaders, Anderson was equipped with the newly arrived US-developed personal motion sensors. Like Hammer, Anvil was clothed in a partial armour uniform. Anderson moved between her troops, reassuring the two rookies as best she could.  
  
Which left the last unit, Roadrunner. Led by Sergeant Liam Donaldson, formerly of the IRA, converted into an undercover agent for the British Army in Belfast. With the recent cessation of violence in NOrthern Ireland, Donaldson had been recruited on the sly for X-Com duties, where he currently enjoyed his work leading the forward recon unit. With him were Jake Peters, a Corporal from the Australian SAS. He'd worked with Jarud Hall before joining X-Com, and often the two could be found in the rec room at Europa, watching TV shows five years behind the ones currently showing in their home countries. Peters had become slightly flighty since he'd had his mind dominated momentarily by Sefeliim, but thankfully he didn't seem to have realised exactly what had happened and what they meant. Unlike the other three units, Roadrunner had no rookies. All were Squaddies or Squad Leaders at the very least, and the last of these were Ibrahim Levi, from Mossad, and Danny Paul, from Delta Force. Mostly, they'd been culled from other units as they'd been torn apart, but had found they worked well together in the light role. Most had small submachine guns in their hands, mostly Uzis, although Levi preferred an Ingram Model-10. Peters preferred his Heckler & Koch MP5-A. All sat checking the sights and clip contact points on their weapons, in silence as befitted professionals of their ilk.  
  
Which was the whole team, if Lefont ignored his own C4 (Command, Control, Communications, Computer) unit - consisting currently of himself, Sefeliim, and the two former Royal Air Force technicians who were currently on the flight deck with the pilots of the Skyranger - and the medical team, two British Army medics who'd seen action in Northern Ireland and knew a few things about retrieving injured in combat zones.  
  
Following that breath, he made sure he had everyone's attention before continuing. While people were only glancing up from weapons and equipment checks from time to time, he knew they were listening attentively. "If you get hit, we will do our best to get you back to medical attention, but that's something we really can't promise."  
  
One of the technicians poked his head through from the forward technology bay. "Five minutes to LZ, sir."  
  
Lefont nodded, then launched into the last-minute mission briefing proper. "We'll be landing in Shoreditch, London, on the southern edge of Shoreditch Park. There, Roadrunner with dismount immediately, and head to the western edge of the park before turning south onto Pitfield Street to the corner of Ivy Street. All these locations are marked on your minimaps, please study them before landing." There was an immediate shuffle of papers as maps throughout the jet were pulled from pockets. "Wait there for go-code Blue. Upon receiving Go-Blue, head east to the corner of Ivy and Hoxton Streets. Wait for Go-Red. Then proceed at haste north to the gates of Coal Hill School and wait for Hammer, Anvil and White Knights to arrive at their assigned locations before proceeding any further. Because the situation beyond that point is unknown, I'll direct from here through your audio/visual transmissions." Lefont referred to the small camera and audio recorders mounted on the soldiers' helmets. "Hammer and Anvil will dismount together, prior to Roadrunner, and will take up defensive positions around the Skyranger. Sixty seconds after Roadrunner have left the immediate area, Hammer will form up and take the northern route from the western edge of the park along Hemsworth Street to Hoxton, at which corner they will wait for Go-Red, and will then proceed south to meet with Roadrunner, and follow the recon unit into the school."  
  
de Salver's hand raised to show she wanted to ask a question. "Colonel? What about -"  
  
Lefont held a hand up to give her pause. "I'm getting to that, Squad Leader. There's an eight thousand tonne alien craft sitting in Shoreditch Park. Half the reason we're landing where we are is because in the main northern section of the park is taken up with the craft. Landing that close will be a risk, but we haven't much choice in the matter - there's just nowhere else nearby we can put down. Hopefully, the aliens haven't yet disembarked from their craft, but if they have, expect resistance on the ground. Also expect massed hysteria from any bystanders. Civilian casualties are an option here, people, so if some mad person runs in front of your guns, hold your fire, regardless of the consequences. I'd rather you both be found burnt to a crisp by plasma than find a dead kid somewhere with a 9mm slug put through them."  
  
Sefeliim took up the speech for a moment. "We will be landing at dusk, so be wary of your surroundings. We will be doing our best to watch for nearby enemies on the screens to let you know of anything you have missed, but do not trust our judgment, we are not the one's out there. Use your motion detectors regularly. Move slowly and quietly. Shoot when you have a clean shot. And -" She caught the wry, 'hey, this is MY speech' look from Lefont, and fell silent.  
  
"What she said applies. Pick your targets carefully. And don't be stupid. Once Roadrunner and Hammer have cleared the school and surrounding streets, move back to the park and play back-up for Anvil and White Knights, who will be forming up on Go-Blue, and storming the craft on Go-Red."  
  
"What if the craft is armed, sir?" de Salver interjected again. "How will the Skyranger withstand that kind of firepower?"  
  
"Our Interceptor pilots have noted that the UFOs they target don't fire back when within a certain distance. So we're hoping that (a) we'll be well-within it's minimum firing distance, or at least out of their firing arcs, or (b) that they've got to power down the ship considerably while they're on the ground. Right now, our Interceptors are fighting multiple small craft higher above the main ship, which seem to be escorts. The fact that the big ship isn't attacking the Interceptors suggests either it has limited firing arcs, or is indeed mostly powered down." Lefont checked his watch. "We ground in a little under two minutes. Make sure you're ready."  
  
"Sir?" asked Donovan. "How many buildings make up the school? Map doesn't say."  
  
Lefont strained his memory before glancing down at Sefeliim, who found the information (if she had ever forgotten it, Lefont found she had ane xcellent memory) before he'd completed turning his head to face her.  
  
"Three main buildings at the front, two large storage sheds-cum-sports venues at the back, on the other side of a soccer field. The forward two buildings meet a large brick wall around the front, creating an enclosed area. The rear building is used as a wall for the back of the soccer field, which itself is surrounded by high brick walls also. It will be tight in there." She fell silent again, hanging onto her strap for a moment longer, then leaving for the forward crew compartment/technology bay to assist with running the crew's equipment. "There is also a small equipment shed right up against the rear wall's southern corner, adjoining the southern storage shed for a third wall."  
  
That satisfied the troops, and nothing more was said, until Lefont called, "Thirty seconds to doors open! Troops, take positions!"  
  
The sixteen X-Com troopers in the bay stood, and headed down into the vehicle storage pit for the rear doors. Hammer and Anvil units moved to the front of the force, unslinging their weapons and flicking safeties off. Then the doors opened at the same time as the landing gear whined while being extended, and the door was fully down moments before the gear touched the surface of the park. Anvil was outside first, taking the northern side of the Skyranger's rear, Hammer out second, on the southern side.  
  
A group of four Sectoids were leading schoolkids across the park towards their craft when the troops disembarked, and Anvil, the closest team, picked targets and fired on the aliens. They didn't fire back, or even recognise that the Skyranger had touched down, but the members of Anvil didn't ponder on that, sweeping back and forth, weapons raised to their cheeks, before taking up positions around the base of the ramp and around the rear landing gear. They kept away from the VTOL exhaust jets, which were ticking in the coolness of the late winter's afternoon sun. There were no other aliens in sight, but that didn't mean much. Hammer swept the other side of the Skyranger before spreading out to take cover from anything unseen.  
  
The students were still continuing in two lines towards the alien vessel, without the guidence of the Sectoids, which suggested to Anderson (now she had a moment to think) that the aliens were controlling the kids... and that perhaps the method of control had taken concentration from looking for threats in the area, and that had been why the aliens were oblivious to them. She had no doubts, however, that that would continue to be the case, and gave orders that her unit keep alert.  
  
Roadrunner disembarked behind her, and jogged off, bent low, heading for cover on the edge of the park. Hiding behind tree trunks, they quickly glaced around the area.  
  
And spotted a Snakeman. It stood on the corner of Pitfield and Hemsworth, slowly coming more alive as if it had just been switched on and was running through a start-up sequence. The plasma rifle began to swing in a low arc, not brought up into a ready position, but at an angle where it wouldn't be hard to bring up. At a signal from Donaldson, Levi, Paul and Peters aimed their weapons, switched them over to three-shot burst mode, and almost as one, pulled the triggers. The quiet pffuts of the silenced weapons stuttered through the quieter street, and ten shots impacted on the Snakeman's skull. One hit a shoulder, pushing it back to the left slightly, and the twelth flew across Hemsworth and smacked into the side of a building, raising a small cloud of dust. Oil and green blood spurted from the impact wounds on the skull, but the creature didn't go down. Instead, it raised itself, flared it's muscular neck cords, and brought the plasma rifle up. Two shots snapped out, but went wide of the team - from the metallic burning sound behind him, and the curses, Donaldson guessed at least one of the shots had hit the Skyranger. He signalled again, and as one, the unit leaned out from behind cover and fired, another twelve shots speeding at the Snakeman. Only seven of these hit, the other five going wide or hitting the road surface, but it seemed to finally be enough: the Snakeman slumped and fell back, the skull splitting wide open. Sparks sizzled necrotic flesh before the internal systems powered down or otherwise gave out, and Roadrunner were on the move again, heading south and crossing the road.  
  
It was only some thirty metres from their previous position to the corner of Ivy Street, but to Donaldson, that was just too much exposed time. Once there, though, they had a wall to lean up against, and in their urban warfare camo uniforms, their edges would hopefully blur against the stone wall and help obstruct enemies targeting them. He couldn't see any aliens in houses nearby, but there was a block of apartments directly across from them, on the southern corner of Ivy Street, and what looked to be a small office complex over on the south-western corner. Both appeared to be deserted, though, mostly because a lot of the people were outside, watching the huge silver object in the park. That wasn't good. The more bystanders, the more potential casualties.  
  
Or witnesses.  
  
It went against Donaldson's professional ethics to have witnesses to his work, especially English witnesses, but for the moment, he let it ride: his face and identity was covered, there was no need to worry about identification and retaliation, not from this mission. He was supposed to be worried about innocent casualties today, and so he hefted his weapon a bit higher, offered a quick prayer, and spun around the corner, dropping low so Peters could spin around and aim above his head.  
  
There. A Sectoid and a Snakeman. He put six rounds into the Sectoid, which was armed with a heavier version of the plasma rifle. Three in the chest, three in the head. It screamed, a warbling screech that echoed in his head as well as his ears, and was thrown backwards, but quickly got up again, still holding the rifle. It aimed, and fired - searing green plasma leapt from the end of the barrel to the wall a few meters from Donaldson. Stone exploded, and people scattered. A cloud of stone dust spread out quickly on the breeze, creating a smokescreen that Donaldson used to his team's advantage. He gestured at the apartments opposite, and the huge concrete pillars holding up the building. "Anyone in there?" he yelled back at Levi, who checked a thermal imager. It wasn't reliable at distance, but was fairly decent close-up, especially in cooler temperatures. It took a moment, but he shook his head. "Lure them under, blow the supports. Bring down part o' the house on them. Understand?" Three nods, Peters' not as firm as the other two.  
  
They heard the rasp of a muscular, scaled monopod on the tarred road surface, and at another gesture from Donaldson, all four made use of the fading cover and sprinted for the apartment block. Once there, Donaldson risked a look back as he threw himself behind a pillar, and saw the Snakeman ponderously turning to face them from the other side of the road. The Sectoid looked like a zombie now, green ichor congealing on its head, still slowly flowing from the chest wounds, but the rifle still held steady. It staggered towards them now, as Paul and Donaldson attached two high-explosive grenades to each of the pillars with gaffer tape. Paul hadn't carried out many demolitions missions with Delta, so he followed his unit leader's lead, knowing that Donaldson had masterminded a bombing spree in London that had destroyed four buildings in the early 1990's with much simpler equipment. Once Donaldson was finished, he grabbed the pins on the grenades and turned to face Paul, who attached the last of the gaffer tape and tucked the roll haphazardly into his waist pouch before grabbing his pins and waiting for the order. The Sectoid stepped into the shadow of the apartment block, and the Snakeman followed, the controller obviously eager for an opportunity to even up the score for this mission.  
  
Donaldson glanced back, saw the next set of supports where Levi and Peters were pressed up behind, and nodded further back at the third set. He gave a moment more in waiting, then yanked his pins and sprinted. Paul did likewise, and as they passed them, Peters and Levi joined in the sprint. At the third set of pillars, they jumped behind cars for cover, the grenades went off, and the front of the apartment block shudder -  
  
- but not fall. Donaldson cursed, four grenades should have done it. He popped up over the hood of the car he was behind, swithced over to full-automatic on his MP5 and began firing at his support. Paul caught on, doing the same for his. Donaldson had to pop a clip and replace it after far too short a time, and the Sectoid was approaching a position it could easily fire; it ignored the flying chips of concrete that peppered it, as did the slithering Snakeman.  
  
The last chunk of concrete broke free from Paul's support, and it sagged, iron structural supports inside struggling to hold up the whole building, but ultimately failing and bending. The Sectoid didn't notice. Donaldson resumed firing, blowing the last few pieces of supporting concrete from his support, which likewise buckled and collapsed in on itself -  
  
- and THEN the building fell in on itself with a grinding sound that had Peters crawling under his car. Clouds of dust billowed outwards, and two stories from above dropped downwards onto the two aliens, but the damage didn't pass the second set of supports, thankfully. Roadrunner emerged from the dust, slowed down, but victorious. Donaldson fingered his mike. "Roadrunner , Sky-1. Three xenos down. Two snakes, one grey. An' one apartment."  
  
"Acknowledged. Hammer is en route to go-red. You have go-blue."  
  
Donaldson clicked his mike twice in confirmation, and led his unit up to the corner of Ivy and Hoxton. Everyone seemed to be in an okay condition, apart from looking like ghosts now. No more aliens challenged their path, but they heard silenced gunfire from a northern location. "Roadrunner to Sky-1, can you confirm action north of Ivy and Hoxton?"  
  
There was a pause from the comms. Then, Sefeliim: "Roadrunner, Sky-1. Confirmed action north of your location. Two greys, two snakes. Hammer is handling it." A large muffled bang. "Sky-1 to Hammer, what the HELL was that?" Donaldson heard come over the open commline frmo someone else. The answer was an equally distant "Car," but he already knew that. He'd heard enough go bang over the years.  
  
"Sky-1, Roadrunner, we got go-red yet?"  
  
"Negative, Roadrunner. Wait for Hammer to get into position."  
  
"There could be backup leaving the school to back up those -"  
  
"Negative, Roadrunner, hold." More fire, from the region of the park now. More background chatter started filtering over the commline.  
  
"- Target that weapons system! -"  
  
"- firing -"  
  
A muffled whoosh, and a crump. Missile, Donaldson thought. The White Knights were involved.  
  
"- three greys, three snakes, and - what the HELL are those fuckers?"  
  
"Donovan, watch your language!"  
  
"White Knights, descriptions please!"  
  
"- floating purple things -"  
  
"- cloaks -"  
  
"Fucking floaters! Wipe 'em all out!" And then the big throaty roar of twin autocannons opening up and a squishing sound over the comm that Donaldson guessed was something organic be9ing chewed up by a few hundred rounds.  
  
"Concentrate fire on the snakes, dammit!"  
  
And then the comms cut out as Sefeliim filtered through to her headset rather than the desktop microphones along the tactical boards in the Skyranger. "Hammer is almost at go-red. Ready your troops for movement, Roadrunner."  
  
Donaldson clicked twice in affirmation, and gestured to his troops to form up. "We'll be going in in a moment. Remember: once inside the school, pick ya targets good. Don't hit no kids. Watch corners an' stairs, too. Alien buggers love those little hidey-holes."  
  
"Go-red," crackled over the comms, and Donaldson gestured. This time, Peters went around low, Donaldson high. They caught sight of Hammer swinging around at the end of the short street, and so Donaldson had Peters move out slightly so they wouldn't shoot each other if anything stepped out of the school gates.  
  
Which something did. But it didn't quite step - rather, it floated. On a giant ball-bearing, so it seemed. It was a light shade of purple, wearing a cloak. Horns hung from its forehead, framing its face. And in its arms, it cradled one of those heavy plasma rifles they'd just seen. Damn. Donaldson picked it out as a target, as did Peters. But Hammer's Hall fired his MP5, and holes appeared in the floater. It gave a peculiar cry, and dropped from the air, the ball-bearing smashing on impact with the ground. Donaldson was shocked; thus far, all the aliens encountered had taken much more punishment than that in combat, but this one... two, maybe three shots from a burst... and it was dead. Damn. This could be easier than expected, he thought to himself. He quickly gestured with his free hand, before returning it to his MP5, and hurried up the street to the gates. Topres readied a smoke grenade, while Hall snuck a look around the corner with a mirror. he made gestures for two greys, and 2 more of the floating things.  
  
Total of four aliens. Then he made the gesture for civilians, lots of them. Damn. Topres considered, then threw the smoke grenade in. They heard the aliens make some kind of squawk, and children yell, then panic and stampede. Donaldson's team went in first, down low, Hammer stepping in behind staying high, covering Roadrunner. Levi picked out a Floater, and shot twice - Paul took out the other. Donaldson and Peters struck at the same Sectoid, which fired its plasma rifle reflexively, incinerating two kids in a ball of green incandescent flame, while Hammer fired at the other, who was fiddling with something in its hand. As the Sectoid went down, the object dropped to the ground and rolled free - and while Donaldson couldn't tell what the object was by its appearance, it was similar enugh in function to Earthen devices for him to feel a momentary rush of panic. "GRENADE!" he yelled, grabbed the nearest two kids and leaping for cover. Peters froze for a moment before diving to the ground, Levi and Paul also grabbing or pushing kids out of the way.  
  
The grenade exploded with a roar of flame and a wall of force that picked up bodies and threw them like twigs in a hurricane. Shrapnel tore through two girls and three boys, peppered the high stone walls that surrounded the front of the school, and lightly injured the X-Com operatives who were inside the walls. Donaldson crawled to his feet a few moments later, ears ringing from the detonation. He became aware that his headset was buzzing inside his headgear, and he triggered the mike. "Donaldson," he slurred.  
  
"Sky-1, Roadrunner." Sefeliim's cool tones. "What was that?"  
  
"Grenade. Alien bugger. Powerful."  
  
"Forced elerium detonation...?" Sefeliim wondered aloud before speaking slightly louder. "Is your team all right?"  
  
Donaldson forced himself to look around. Paul was forcing himself up, shaking his head, checking on the kids he'd grabbed. All three he'd managed to get over were bruised, crying or screaming with pain from smoking craters up their legs, but would be okay after some time in hospital. Paul's back armour was shredded, and smoke wafted from a few small holes in his skin, but nothing immediately life-threatening. Levi was about the same. But Peters was out cold, curled up in a ball. A chunk of shrapnel had raked itself along his leg, another across his ribs: he'd be in some pain once he woke up. Donaldson triggered his mike again. "Levi and Paul are okay. Peters is down. Out cold, and injured besides."  
  
"Does he require medical assistance?"  
  
Donaldson focussed on the bleeding injuries. "Uuuhh... yeah... that's a yeah. We'll be going inta the school soon as we right ourselves in the head."  
  
"Take your time... let Hammer lead, if need be."  
  
"Yeah. Yeah, okay." He clicked off, and gestured to Topres, who was stepping into the courtyard cautiously, his team checking windows for non-human faces. "You go in first, mate. We're... crapped out at th' moment..."  
  
Topres nodded, and led his force in through the front doors.  
  
******  
  
Lefont leaned over Sefeliim's shoulder in the Skyranger's flight deck, peering at the monitor where Topres' shoulder camera was transmitting to. The scene of the courtyard was replaced by the dim interior of the school's main foyer, before the camera adjusted to the inside light after being outside so long. Lockers and bags were strewn across the floor, papers, books and other imflammables were combusting around plasma burns. Several teachers and police officers also lay about, dead or dying. One WPC lay propped up against a bag rack where her fellow officers had left her as they pressed on, half her torso burnt away, the bloodied scorch mark surrounded by blood on the floor a few metres away evidence of where she had been standing when hit.  
  
"That's..."  
  
"Grusome?"  
  
"I was going to say overkill, but yes." Lefont followed the transmission's progress as they kicked open doors and entered rooms. He also watched as Carol Bennings swung a motion detector around, watching for movement. She held up two fingers, and pointed to a branching corridor a few metres up. Topres and Harada raised their guns, while Hall covered their backs, and when the two aliens floated around the corner, their horned faces disappeared in a flash of purple ichor before they hit the ground. "The school... they could have landed anywhere... away from the police or army or even us... at a place in the countryside where there were hundreds of people... why here?"  
  
Sefeliim shook her head, glanced at Roadrunner's monitor feed where Paul was throwing up against a wall, headgear yanked up enough to clear his mouth. "I am not sure, Harrison. I suspect... I do not know. I cannot say. I can surmise, but that is it."  
  
"Surmise, then."  
  
"Terror. Pure and simple. This is not about gathering... people... or attacking you or your nations directly. This is about causing terror. A fearing populace is easier to attack."  
  
Lefont shrugged. "Isn't pushing us into a siege mentality going to hurt them even more?"  
  
Sefeliim didn't know, and she said as much. "Possibly. But there must be some reasoning behind it. Perhaps they can isnert agents while doing this. Perhaps the mission - their mission - was supposed to fail. Perhaps there is more force in that vessel than we have realised or theorised."  
  
"Like... you mean that gun that started firing."  
  
Sefeliim shook her head. "That was... perhaps to be expected. Antipersonnel defences. It would likely be thought to be useless against a vehicle such as this - it was obviously a light weapon."  
  
"Those light plasma weapons, like the pistols, can still chew through our armour, and that had to at least be as strong as one of their rifles."  
  
Now Sefeliim shrugged. "I do not know. I can only surmise, theorise. I may very well be wrong here."  
  
Lefont took her arm, led the alien changeling into the short corridor between the flight deck and troop bay. She looked at him curiously, but said nothing, guessing what the topics of conversation would now include. "Can you... I don't know, sense anything from them?"  
  
"There is a telepathic pool of some description. I cannot... describe it. It is familiar, I believe Sectoid in origin. But... the linguistics..."  
  
"Did you tell me that telepathy was just like... images? Concepts and pictures that the receiving brain organised into words and sounds that it could understand? So -"  
  
"These... pictures and concepts as you call them are very different to anything I have previously encountered. Incredibly alien, you might say. Older, more primal, more powerful. And yet so much more complex than typical Sectoid reason." Sefeliim cast about for an analogy. "Remember what we talked about, back in the medical laboratory, a few months ago? We could liken that discussion to an ant wanting to know what a human thought - the ant's brain just would not be able to comprehend when the human could and, if forced to, would explode. Not physically, but its brain would... 'melt'. This is... similar... in concept. I could force myself to try to understand what this language is, these concepts, reasonings, yet I fear it would 'melt' my brain. Perhaps make me like my people."  
  
"Ah."  
  
Sefeliim gave Lefont a wry smile. "Indeed. Ah. Such a simple word to display complex subtlties. And before you ask, yes, I have been feeling that technological field that is controlling the Snakemen. Possibly the others, also, but I have not yet been close enough to living members of them to feel the field."  
  
"Okay." Lefont sighed, thought for a few moments. "While the school's being cleared, should we take Anvil and White Knight into the UFO?"  
  
"That is your call."  
  
"I know. I'm thinking aloud and you're my sounding board. If we go in now, without clearing the school, we could end up with a dozen or more aliens at our backs. Eight thousand tonnes is a big ship, and we could get lost - if we can even get inside. It's not like the craft is damaged and partially inoperative - it's working properly, it's got escorts, and we don't know what the insides are like. What antipersonnel weapons it has, like you said." He sighed, dipping his head forward onto a fist. "Hmm. I guess we've got no choice. They could be making ready to leave the ground, with who knows how many people inside... if we can stop it from leaving, I'm sure the government can explain the rest of this. If they leave, though, and take a whole lot of civilians with them... god knows how they'd explain a hallucination that kidnaps people."  
  
"I cannot say."  
  
"Yeah. Didn't think you would. Damn. We go in," he added, after a moment's hesitation before turning again for the flight deck. "Anvil? White Knights? You're going in early. Get to the bridge, take out the bridge crew. Stop that sucker from leaving."  
  
******  
  
Monique de Salver called her troops up, and they gathered loosely under the Skyranger. "Guys, we'll be providing cover fire for Anvil as they head to the entrance. Our secondary mission will be to enter with Anvil, and hunt down aliens inside. Okay? Missiles only in the big areas, guys, and be careful with the firepower in there - we'll most likely be in tight confines with lots of innocents around - remember those schoolkids that went in? Check your fire. And everyone - grab a pistol and a few magazines from the troop bay, pronto. Anvil'll cover us while we restock." She nodded over at Sylvia, who nodded back before the White Knights ran up the back ramp for additional weaponry. Once they came back down, and had taken up positions, Sylvia Anderson led Anvil out of cover, jogging in a low position for the UFO's doorway.  
  
Once arranged around the doors, with nothing firing at them as they approached, Anderson took up position to the left of the door, where there was a small recessed touchpanel, apparently for opening and closing the door. Krivopusk and Suzuka took up positions in front of the door, a few metres back, while Colston stood to the right of the door, a few metres back, in case anything particularly hairy came tearing through when the doors opened. Anderson nodded to Suzuka, who yanked a grenade from her webbing, and pulled the pin. Anderson opened the door, Suzuka threw the grenade, Anderson shut the door, and everyone leapt away, just in case. A pair of heartbeats later, there was a dull muffled thump from behind the door, and a small part of the hull buckled slightly, but then Anvil was back up and in position, crouched and ready to fire. Anderson touched the door control again, and the door lifted into the hull.  
  
Inside were the remains of two Sectoids, and a Floater. All had been armed with heavy plasma rifles, and some other small items of equipment, including a silvered ball with what appeared to be circuitry floating just under the surface. Further up the corridor, another silvered ball lay, but this was shattered, broken into pieces, and Anderson noted that there was some hefty technologies packed into the tiny thing. Not knowing what they were, she stepped over them, and headed deeper into the craft, her teammates following behind. She could hear the White Knights outside coming up to the door, and heading down the other direction of the corridor.  
  
A dozen metres down, they came to an intersection. Directly opposite was a doorway, to the north was another corridor. Anderson lifted her motion sensor from the webbing around her chest with a free hand, and checked it: one moving form in the room opposite, nothing else down the corridor, or within twenty metres that couldn't be explained by the troops at her back or White Knights. A quick peek with a mirror around the corner showed nothing there, just another door about fifteen metres up. She nodded at the door, gesturing to Colston to take one side, Krivopusk the other, and Suzuka to take the rear position. Anderson crouched down low before opening the door.  
  
Inside was a Floater. Two snapped shots through the head took it down, slumping over a console in front of it. Anderson quickly swept the small room, seeing lots of technology, and some great big thrumming pillars of light and coiled machinery of some kind, but nothing else that could pose a threat. She closed the door, and the unit continued down the corridor.  
  
The door exited into a huge room, with more of the pillars of light and coiled machines, but they were seemingly fenced off with a low wall. Primarily, the room looked like an operating theatre crossed with an abattoir and an armoury. Benches with channels sliced into them dominated the major portion of the room, with massive equipment that looked like drills, screws, and the laser projectors the science types at Base Europa were experimenting with pointing downwards at the benches. Several of the benches were occupied, people and cattle and sheep on them. Down the far end of the room were a series of massive tanks, filled with churning liquids. Anderson felt sick as she saw shapes inside that appeared to be humans and animals. Along a nearby wall were an assortment of weapons and equipment, including the silver globes she'd noted back at the entrance.  
  
Also in the room were a dozen Sectoids and a handful of Floaters. And the slithering noise up from the tank end of the room suggested there were more than a few Snakemen in the room, also. She waved her hand above her head. "Cover! Take cover and pick targets carefully!" With Suzuka, she jumped behind a nearby console bank, praying it would be strong enough to withstand any firepower directed at it.  
  
Anvil picked out the Floaters first, mowing them down with speed. But the aliens weren't armed yet, and were heading for the gun racks. "Sectoids! Get the Sectoids!"  
  
Her team swapped targets, and fired on the light brown aliens. Two fell, but the others remained mostly operational, grabbing weapons and firing back towards Anvil. One grabbed a silver globe, and closed its huge eyes, and Anderson felt Suzuka beside her stir, turning her weapon on her squad leader. Anderson found Suzuka's eyes empty of intelligence, reversed her MP5 and smashed the Japanese woman in the stomach, swinging up to crack her in the jaw, and as the woman fell to the ground, brought it down on her crotch, just to make sure. "Watch out! They can... control your minds!" she yelled back to her team. "Fire on the ones with the balls!" She eld by example, emptying half a clip into the one who'd taken Suzuka so easily. It went down with a warbling screech.  
  
Just as Anderson thought her team had a chance, the Snakemen arrived. Five of them, armed with heavy plasma rifles. Damn. They snap-fired across the room, not caring who or what they hit. A Sectoid went down, a hole blasted through its back, the last remaining Floater's head was vapourised, and Colston screamed for half a second as his stomach was burnt out. Anderson snuck a look back quickly, saw he'd been well behind cover, but the plasma charge had just melted through the large console bank and then continued on without much loss of energy. Damn. "Grenades!"  
  
But before she could ready one, the Snakemen erupted in a ball of flame. "Rockets!" she heard someone yell. Then, the distinctive roar of twin autocannons, chewing through anything left standing, the shots eating into the floor just in front of the console Anderson was behind.  
  
"They're all down!" she heard de Salver yell from the other side of the room. There had to be a back entrance, Anderson realised, before standing hesitantly up. She called over the commline for medical assistance for Colston and Suzuka, who was beginning to come round, rolled up into a ball and moaning and cursing in fluent japanese, but at least sounding herself.  
  
de Salver presented herself to Anderson. "Did you find stairs, a lift, anything back your way?" she asked. Anderson shook her head. "Damnation. Nothing our way, either." It was then that a yell from Krivopusk attracted their attention. He'd discovered a glowing plate that had attracted his attention when he saw dust particles rising in it, and he'd kicked in an alien silver globe to see what it did. It had risen, and then passed through a similar glowing plate in the lowered ceiling of that part of the room.  
  
"I think it is an elevator," he'd said, before getting the go-ahead to step into the column of light himself. He rose up, and passed through the ceiling. Moments later, he passed back down through it to the floor. "It is," he confirmed. "There is an empty room up there, as well."  
  
"Right. Krivopusk, you go first. Take up a covering position, White Knights, you guys go next. I'll bring up the rear once Medical's here to get... Colston and Suzuka, and then I'll bring up the rear. Understood?"  
  
Suzuka struggled to her feet. "I... I think I am all right, Squad Leader. It's..." She shook her head, trying to clear it.  
  
Anderson shook her head. "No. No, you'll go out with Medical. I don't want nor need to find that... thing had some residual effect on you." Suzuka dropped her eyes in shame at seeming so weak, nodded, and slumped back behind the console as she ejected the clip from her machinegun. Anderson moved to the rear of the group while the remnant of her unit and the White Knights used the elevator system. Two minutes later, the pair of medics had arrived from the Skyranger, packing a bodybag and a stretcher with them. Anderson noted they looked harried, out of breath, and guessed they'd been called elsewhere recently. So there'd been at least one other casualty... she watched as they zipped the Australian into the bag, placed him on top of the stretcher, and carried it out of the ship as they led Suzuka with them. Then, shaking her head, she joined her troops on the next level of the ship. They still had a lot of ground to cover.  
  
******  
  
Cydonia, current home of the invading forces. On the surface, nothing too recognisable remained of the city that had once dominated the locality, but beneath the surface lay a monster of a city: huge processing facilities, refineries, storage areas the size of small towns, living quarters for upwards of fifty million peoples, ship fabricators, command and control centres.  
  
All controlled from one place. This place. A medium-sized tri-levelled room. The end with medium height looked out over the subterrainian cityscape, with a range of access terminals and data retrieval systems clustered in a workpit in the centre of that deck. The upper level was encased in shadows, with railings and technology dominating the view. But something up there moved. Nefflim could see it even now, shifting around to get comfortable, presumably. He didn't know. The information flow really only ran the one way: from him into it.  
  
He moved, thoughtlessly, up to the edge of the window, one small hand resting on the guide rail - as if he'd fall through the protective glass! - and there he waited, waiting patiently for the next report. There was one due, soon. Hopefully successful, good news was becoming hard to come by lately. This X-Com agency had been stepping up activities and was making life difficult for pilots and troops in the European theatre of operations.  
  
Yet while the number of troops - as well as the inclusion of a large vessel and armed escorts - dropped in one of the major metropolitan centres would suggest a successful outcome, Nefflim would not yet accept it would be. X-Com was proving to be too resourceful. He didn't know if his "sister" was proving to be the catalyst from turning X-Com from a Kiryu-Kai into the invasion-beater it was becoming, but he couldn't dismiss the fact that the longer she was operational with them, the more chance she would assist the humans resist the invasion.  
  
As Nefflim had once wanted to do. Freedom. Freedom from domination. But he had a new cause now: introducing the human race to the domination he and his people faced.  
  
Finally. He heard a junior behind him approach with a report. The thing behind his eyes gathered the information from the junior's mind, dismissing him back to his work, and scanned the relevant information. Nefflim's eyes narrowed in thought and anger as he continued probing the report, of the X-Com operatives not only clearing out the school and causing much damage to the troop units on Earth, as well as denying them massed quantities of foodstuffs, but they were now rampaging through the transport, and taking exceedingly minimal losses. Well, there wasn't anything he could do about that now. Just recall the ship from Earth, and plan anew.  
  
It seemed that the typical control methods weren't functioning in combat conditions as had been hoped. Perhaps Nefflim would have to initiate other forms of troop development that didn't necessarily include biological components for the platform...  
  
As his mind drifted off into new realms of thought, Nefflim remembered to send the recall order to the ship on Earth.  
  
******  
  
Sefeliim's head snapped up from where her chin had been resting on her chest, leaning back in her chair. The sudden movement tipped the chair over backwards, where she ended up sprawling on the floor. "Harrison? There has just been an incoming... transmission." She gave extra emphasis on the word transmission with her eyes, because of the flight technicians in the room with them.  
  
Lefont knew what she meant. "Any ideas on... what it meant?"  
  
She shook her head. "Not a clue. But it sounded urgent."  
  
"Like... take off and blast everything from orbit urgent?"  
  
"No. But I would surmise that perhaps just 'take off' was part of it. Evacuate." She gestured at the row of monitors, showing dead aliens and rescued school children on more than half. "Their mission, whatever it was, has been unsuccessful. They are facing loss of what could be an important economic structure to them... depending on how much material they have currently in supply or within easy reach. A ship this size, with a hyperdrive, could possibly be a mass investment of resources that might not be able to be replenished easily."  
  
"Such as..." Lefont drew out in his mind, "that radioactive element?"  
  
Sefeliim nodded. A quick flicker of her eyes towards the technicians suggested she had more information, but couldn't divulge it right now. Lefont made a note to ask her about it later. "Yes. It... might not be so prevalent in this system as it is in... their system."  
  
"Hmm." Lefont fingered his mike over to the frequencies used by White Knights and Anvil. "Be aware: we've just detected a transmission of some kind, sounding urgent, to that ship. We suspect it might be an evacuation order. I want that ship to remain here."  
  
"Understood, Sky-0," Anderson's voice came back with some minor static. "Won't we have time while they recover troops?"  
  
"My guess is they'll just launch when able... if they're evacuating, I'd say they've written everyone still outside off." Lefont paused. "I don't think it'll be long before it launches, if that's the case."  
  
"Understood, Colonel. We'll keep this toybox down one way or the other." She paused, now. "Um... do you have any suggestion on where to find the bridge?"  
  
Lefont's gaze flickered to Sefeliim, who grabbed the information sitting in his public thoughts without realising. Go up to the top level. Then... did you see anything that looked like a giant series of rings piled around a pole? They are engines. They will be at the back and sides of the ship, on the bottom floor, not at the front. The front of the top deck is where you will find the bridge."  
  
Lefont relayed the information, got an 'affirmative', then sighed as the channel closed. He checked the holster on his hip, unbuttoned the top, headed out the back to the rear bay doors to wait. Sefeliim watched, wondering just how it felt for a man of action to be forced into immobility and an inability to assist his troops by his command role. Also wondering just what it would take to get him into action. She shrugged, forced such thoughts from her mind, and concentrated on leading Roadrunner through light mop-up duty on the monitors.  
  
Still, her eyes flicked up to the rear bay camera feed every so often...  
  
******  
  
They passed through the fourth floor, and into the fifth, having downed another dozen aliens. Mostly Sectoids, but there were a pair of Floaters (one unarmed) and a pair of Snakemen. Donovan had chewed both of those up with his autocannon, and there hadn't been enough left to be too recognisable. They'd come across more rooms full of depravity - human and animal corpses decomposing into a slurry in transparent tanks, what looked like surgical suites with weird stylised graphics around the walls, suggesting some nasty reproductive experiments, and also some kind of weapons locker - while looking for the weird elevator shafts leading upwards. They appeared to operate based on thought - you thought up, you went up, and likewise down - but Anderson didn't know.  
  
And strangely enough, considering the relative ease with which they'd made it that far, and considering the small number of crew up on the fifth level, it was on this top deck they first really ran into trouble.  
  
As had become standard, Rico slung his Nimrod-2A over his shoulder, and stepped to the side of the door. de Salver and Anderson took up positions just either side of the door edges on the opposite side of the room, while Lewis readied a rocket and Krivopusk stood about even with the elevator pad, weapon sighted and ready for immediate firing.  
  
Seemingly not ready enough.  
  
When Rico triggered the door, a trio of brilliant green plasma blasts incinerated his body before slamming into the wall between de Salver and Anderson, both of whom hit the floor. Anderson's MP5 was aimed first, and she triggered off a long burst of fire down the corridor, but there was nothing in sight. de Salver waited to pick a target, and got her wish momentarily.  
  
The short corridor exited into a large room, with several tiers of consoles and ceiling-mounted monitors showing weird glyphs that hurt de Salver's eyes to look at for long. Then, from around the corner stepped a Sectoid, arm back to throw something. de Salver, recognising the typical pose for delivering a grenade, fired, her weapon stuttering in her hands, the magazine bouncing off the decking, causing the line of fire to jerk about a bit in the vertical dimension. But the bullets stitched a line of holes up its body, from crotch to forehead, and even if the shots didn't kill it, it was thrown backwards off its feet, the grenade rolling from its hand. de Salver recognised the threat just as soon as Anderson did, and suddenly both ere on their feet, urging their troops down the elevator again and trying to shut the door.  
  
The initial plasma discharges had fused the doors shut, though, and after around five seconds, the grenade blew. Lewis, the third onto the elevator pad, and about halfway through the floor, died instantly as a chunk of console sliced her in two. Anderson and de Salver were pressed up against the wall sections, praying like hell they'd be protected. And apart from some bouncing of shrapnel and a quick gout of flame that singed their uniforms and exposed skin, they were indeed fine.  
  
The UFO was theirs.  
  
******  
  
On Cydonia, the junior operator registered the loss of signal transmission from the vessel, logged it as lost, and recalled the escorts. He then quickly sent a report into the pool for Nefflim, who would receive it when he next stirred from his current ponderings on artificial troop units.  
  
******  
  
Donaldson changed the channel on the base infirmary television to catch the latest news. It was a brilliant redhead, dressed conservatively, reading calmly from an autocue. Over her shoulder was an icon of a pair of rifles superimposed over an image of Ireland.  
  
"- oreditch, Special Air Servicemen from former RAF Credenhill succeeded in stopping a terrorist nerve gas attack. Responsibility for the attack has been claimed by a splinter group of the Irish Republican Army, Homeward IRA, in response to recent problems in the peace negotiations between Whitehall and Shin Fein. The group was well-armed, with access to Russian helicopters and large-bodied transports, as well as an as-yet unspecified nerve agent that caused temporary hallucinations. Sources close to the Ministry of Def -"  
  
He clicked the television off, and rolled over, trying to get some sleep.  
  
******  
  
Inside one of the laboratory's side rooms, Lefont sipped a mug of black coffee while Sefeliim waved her hands, paced and spoke of things high above his head, nodding occasionally as her eyes shifted back to him for the affirmation of his understanding. The semi-occasional rolling of her eyes suggested that she was picking up on the fact he didn't understand much of her words.  
  
Finally, she started to wind down. "And also, in the wreckage, were parts of a hyper-wave communicator. It was on the bridge, so it is extensively damaged, but I would like to try and tinker with it some. See what I can make of it...?"  
  
Lefont nodded, finally. She was just going to keep bringing the damned thing up otherwise. But he made a mental note to have someone work with her on it, and have the base cameras trained on the experiments, for security purposes. Sefeliim appeared trustworthy, but he couldn't be one hundred percent sure. "Go for it."  
  
"We also recovered... some navigational equipment and control equipment. Harry believes we could reverse-engineer both within six months, and have a... he said headstart... on developing new vehicles for combat duty. Also another dozen" completely unintelligible word mixed with squeaks and clicks, "reactors. No, that does not sound right. How do you name your elements?"  
  
"Uh..." Caught off-guard, Lefont reflexively replied, "I don't know."  
  
"Indeed. Do you mind?" She gestured at his head. Lefont drew back for a moment, then realised that wouldn't do anything if she wanted to nivade his privacy. He nodded. She concentrated, thought, then nodded. "So. A name that hasn't been taken. It is listed as 115 on our... period table. Periodic table. So. Element-115. Eleium. How does that sound?" Lefont shook his head. "That bad. Ending in -ium, still. Elemenium?" She sounded that out in her head a few times. Still sounded wrong. "Sounds too much like aluminium. Swap the 'm' for an 'r'? Elerium-115?" Lefont decided to nod. Seemed to make Sefeliim happy. "We have got quite a few 'Elerium-115' reactors, so once someone develops a use for the material... we have plenty we can use."  
  
"So I'll need to okay research on the material so we can figure out what to do with it?" Lefont asked. It was Sefeliim's turn to nod. "Yeah. Okay. Done."  
  
"How... long until the craft is returned to us here?" Sefeliim asked, almost hesitantly.  
  
"Once we've determined it's safe to bring back. No locators still working, that kind of thing," Lefont replied. "Then we've got to arrange for heavy-lifting gear. That's an eight thousand tonne bulk. I'm not sure HOW we can move it, actually, without disassembling it at the park and bringing it here."  
  
"Or rigging up some kind of control mechanism and flying it here under its own power," Sefeliim suggested.  
  
"Do you think you could do that?"  
  
Sefeliim gave it some thought. "Possibly. I would need at least a few days to work out how to do it, but yes, I should be able to work something."  
  
Lefont consulted the list of research items Sefeliim had been voted to bring him. What was next? "Yeah, you do that," he murmured distantly while he figured out where he was up to. Ah, there we go. "Trials on the motion sensors are going well. So, with UniTechnical working on those in the US, at least until our own engineering team can be expanded, I'd like us to focus more on these laser weapons Lavelle's been experimenting with. How close to a test model are we on them?"  
  
Sefeliim rolled her eyes back in thought, digging up the information requested. It took her a moment to bring it up for perusal. "I am not that sure. One, perhaps two months away from a prototype model. As yet, Harry's team has managed to fix the problems they had been encountering with beam dispersal in an atmosphere through an extra set of focussing lenses, tightening of the beam's width, and increased power to the generator. However, the device is as yet still too large to be man-portable, and will need additional time in R&D to be of any use to your troops. Harry is looking at the general layout of the recovered plasma weapons to see how... how my people solved the problem."  
  
"You didn't have weaponry?"  
  
"We had defensive weapons on T'leth. But that was all they were." Sefeliim stopped her pacing, and leaned against a table. "I find it highly offensive that my people have resorted to building offensive weapons. I can understand your need for them, and accept them so long as I am not using them... I understand that completely. I also understand your race is yet young, and prone to overreacting and... adverse to finding alternate means to victory, or even alternate victories."  
  
"I realise we must seem like kids to you -"  
  
"That does not bother me. I saw... many races as part of T'leth, Harrison. At many stages of development. Many used violence. My race did not. I... find this difficult. Hence my wish to be more involved with research, over directing combat. Today... was difficult."  
  
"We live and learn."  
  
"Yes," Sefeliim said sadly. "We do indeed."  
  
The conversation was fast moving off-track, so Lefont changed it completely, brought it back to something that he'd been wondering about. "You mentioned this... Elerium earlier today, and suggested that it might be rare here in this solar system. Are you speaking of actual knowledge?"  
  
The changeling nodded. "Yes. Upon arrival in this system, 64 million of your years ago, our initial surveys showed that there was no Elerium in the system. None that we could detect, anyway, which when considering the resolution of our sensors, says if there was any, it was literally only trace amounts. The Elerium they are using in their ships is not native to this system, and has likely either been brought to this system... or was scavenged from the cargo bays or reactors of T'leth or the expeditionary ship I was evacuated on."  
  
"Assuming that they haven't found this... colony ship of yours," Lefont asked slowly, "How much Elerium did the escape ship have on it?"  
  
Sefeliim shrugged. "Had the ship continued under normal operations, I would say it would have been exhausted millions of years ago. Had they used it sparingly, or settled a world in this system and used other power sources, theoretically they could have stored much of the reserves and could have a lot left now."  
  
"We didn't see these aliens until about fifty years ago," Lefont stated, "So what would your theory be about why they've been so shy about coming forward before now?"  
  
Sefeliim shrugged again, looking apologetic. "I do not know. Perhaps they settled somewhere, and then placed themselves in stasis, to be woken up in the future. And perhaps someone woke them up who had... a use for them that goes against what my people believe. That would make sense. The subtleties of the concepts I have experienced when in telepathic communication, or registering such communciations... they are very alien. No root at all based in the languages I was used to or learned in. Nothing even remotely similar. They come from a very different race."  
  
"But over 64 million years..."  
  
"My people would have evolved beyond the point they would be recognisable to me," Sefeliim completed. "As well as would have no more Elerium."  
  
"Unless shipped in from elsewhere."  
  
"Point," she conceeded, then checked her watch. "It is late. And has been a long day."  
  
"And the Adult Movie channel on Satellite starts in ten minutes?" Lefont asked with a grin.  
  
Sefeliim didn't know she could blush until she did. "My interest in human sexual relations is pureply - clinically - scientific."  
  
"Of course," Lefont smiled, and gestured to the door. "I'll turn the lights out."  
  
Which he did.  
To be continued.  
  
Author's Notes:  
  
Finally finished this chapter... it's been sitting uncompleted for about 2 months on my HD, in fact barely started. I got to the end of the introductory piece, where the Skyranger lands - and promptly ran out of steam. So the last three days I've been finishing it off, in addition to working on some other bits and pieces related to this fic.  
  
Which won't bear fruit for a while, if at all.  
  
I've been slack in writing the last four months, across all my fics; I've had a few things go wrong, one of the pups got hit by a car a few months back, a family member had a rather unsuspecting close call with some nasty club drugs (*always* get your own drinks and make sure no bugger puts anything in them) and my parents' break-up going really sour after nearly a year and a half of physical separation (as compared to the 7 or 8 years of mental and emotional separation prior to now) that's dragged me through lots of crap, trying to put up with their crap as well as my own :P Also, for the next couple of weeks, I'm working, so going to be exhausted, and thought I'd best finish this chapter over this long weekend before I'm too sore and aching and sunburnt to write.  
  
To those who are following my other fics... Love 14 has been started, but will likely remain untouched for another couple of weeks. Love Song will be updated again, but probably after Love has finished, but before I get into Justice, likewise any more chapters of X-Com. I've written this one so it can stand as something of a series-finisher until I've got more time to work on it. Until then, I'll be occasionally working on some other things that you can find at until I get a page done up for it (likely when I've got something interesting to show). Anyways... see you all next chapter, I guess. 


	6. XCom 6

DISCLAIMER: Relatively standard stuff. Existing character types (specifically the alien races), certain vehicles and buildings, and so forth are properties of Microprose or whomever now holds the rights (2k Marin?). As the characters are original, the characters are my property, and so's the story (but plot for events belongs to Microprose or current other owner), hence ownership and copyright of them belongs to me. Contact me at .au if you want permission to use anything I've written for whatnot purposes.

**X-COM: Enemy Unknown **

**By Raymond Cooper**

**Fox Three, X-Com Zero**

**Shoreditch, London**

Sefeliim groaned and buried her face in her hands, allowing her soldering iron to drop onto the console surface. It was 4AM, and she was buried up to her elbows in console innards. She chastised herself mentally over her belief to Lefont she would be able to reactivate the UFO that still lay resting in Shoreditch Park to allow it to be piloted to a more remote location. So far, she had deactivated four tracking beacons that tried to activate once power was fed into various systems – communications, helm, engines and bizarrely the sound system. Sefeliim had been unusually touched to hear that what passed for entertainment music on T'leth was stored on the ship's systems, and had wanted to have it playing quietly in the background while she worked. Sadly, when the beacon had activated, Sefeliim had been forced to shut the system down.

That hadn't stopped the beacon, though, which had detached itself from the interior and grown legs and scuttled off. A stomp from her boot had stopped its flight for freedom, and Sefeliim had taken a quick cursory look before peeling it off the floor and handing it to an excited tech. She wondered if it was the first alien technology he'd literally placed in his hands? A quick probe of his surface thoughts would reveal that answer, but Sefeliim wasn't trying to do that anymore.

No, she was a Sectoid – a Grey, as known to the members of X-Com – but she looked and appeared for all intents and purposes to be human. And she had to be as human as she could. To that end, she had cultivated an interest in human body language, entertainment, and pornography, which judging by the tastes and interests of the people back at X-Com: Base Europa was something very important to human sexuality.

Still, while she found she enjoyed watching the pornography for its comedic intent, she found manually stimulating her own sexual organs to be rather unsatisfying. She had tried "faking" an orgasm as she was assured by her friend Sylvia all the actresses were doing, but that left her feeling even colder. It didn't help that while the mechanics of what she had to do were simple, the actual act itself wasn't, and it required some knowledge of human anatomy and sensation that she just didn't have. Seeing as most of the women on base felt sexually unsatisfied by their partners, she didn't think that was a good enough sample population to query any deeper.

Now, she was on the bridge of the transport ship, the non-human bodies long-since cleaned out and anything that wasn't nailed down as the humans said removed and patched, trying to reactivate the engines. While she wasn't a technician, Sefeliim still had more knowledge of what her race's technology did than the scientists at Base Europa, who seemed to be more excited children with a new toy. Or, as she had seen on television, a baby with a new rattle. They would shake it and shake it and see what came out.

Except this needed finesse. Two techs stood around behind her, X-Com's first official engineers. Tom Davis on loan from MIT and Kate Wilson seconded from Marshall Space Flight Centre, where she had worked most recently on the X-33 and X-34 space plane designs, but this was nothing like she had ever seen before. Both of them just kind of stood still and quiet, as if not moving and only casting furtive glances around with their eyes would not allow the ship to know of their presence.

After a few minutes of this, Sefeliim gave an internal sigh, and straightened up, retrieving her soldering iron and turning to face the two engineers. "Aren't you supposed to be geniuses?"

Tom fiddled nervously with a button on his shirt and looked like he wanted to slip into a crack on the deck plating. His emotional spectrum, like Kate's, blasted nervousness and an urge to be somewhere else. That said, his also showed the most curiously, and a spark that burned brightly that suggested he was itching to be turned loose on the ship to pick it up, shake it and shake it and see what dropped out.

Another baby with a rattle, but one who might then be able to put the rattle back together.

"Um, we were just told to report here," he answered haltingly. The small Asian glowering at him waving the heated soldering iron in his face apparently intimidated him. Interesting. Most men Sefeliim had met so far weren't intimidated by women, especially those shorter than them. And while she was just under five feet high, Tom was six and a half feet tall – just very, very thin and lanky with a shock of black hair on his head. Kate was five and a half feet, comfortably in the middle, with a shock of red hair that Sefeliim guessed from her television watching of BBC dramas meant she had Irish origins somewhere in her family. Or maybe it was dyed, Sefeliim could never tell.

Kate moved past hesitantly, and glanced into the opened console Sefeliim had been working from. "There's fibre bundles and liquid and glass or crystal in here. What are you soldering for?"

Sefeliim turned back to the console. "I am trying to rig a control system to bypass the ship's main core, so we don't get locked out or co-opted into flying somewhere else when we power up the ship."

"That's always good," Kate muttered, bending over and poking around. "Are these optic fibres? No, that's not glass. And that's not OW light. Electrical impulses? Is this some kind of organic tubule?"

"Yes," Sefeliim replied, before turning back to Tom, who was instead checking one of the other consoles. No, not the console itself, she realised, but the front plating that held several burning scars from where the elerium grenade had gone off earlier in the week. He poked at the holes and found they didn't go through to the sensitive technology on the other side. He had a thoughtful look on his face, and Sefeliim guessed it was something to do with the ultra-light material.

"Has... has anyone taken a look at this?" he asked, turning to face Sefeliim.

"No," she replied. "Although I assume you mean the material as a whole rather than whether the console is working?"

"That's right," Tom glanced back down at the console front, deep in thought. He crouched down next to it again and ran his fingers through the holes.

Sefeliim's headset chirped for attention, and she thumbed the switch on it to active. "Go ahead."

"Good morning from Europa." Colonel Harrison Lefont's voice sounded remarkably alert for the time in the morning.

"I've been working through the night, Harrison. Please forgive me if I don't sound overly enthused that you're not sounding as tired as I am right now."

"Can you join me here right now?"

Sefeliim looked back at the two juniors, already picking apart what they appeared most interested in, and shrugged. She stepped into a side room for some privacy and triggered the door control to hide herself from any prying eyes. She closed her eyes moments later, relaxing, and reaching out.

* * *

**Beckenswood**

Lefont jumped slightly as Sefeliim appeared beside him, almost standing on the ground this time. She looked exhausted, dark rings under her chocolate eyes, hair hanging limply around her face with soot smudges across her cheeks and forehead. Her clothing looked coated in fluids both sweat and exotic, and Lefont swore he could smell her even though she in actuality stood half a country away. But, she was in his mind, and this was how his brain interpreted her state and appearance for him.

"What's happening?"

"We think we have an incoming craft coming in low over the Mediterranean on a course for London. It's big, weighing in at twenty-four thousand tonnes judging by air displacement." Lefont glanced around at the digital re-creation of the globe on the two storey-sized screen opposite the balcony he stood on, spinning slowly to show the suspected alien craft centred. Arrows and computations showing the ship's projected course led from the Mediterranean and through the heart of London.

Sefeliim took in the information on the screen quickly, seeing through Lefont's eyes with the implied permission given. "Why is it coming in so low? Wouldn't it be faster to drop down from orbit almost on top of London?"

"I don't know. We don't know. We don't even know if it will continue on this course, but it will be in London in about fifteen minutes. I want you and your team back on the Skyranger in ten minutes, tops."

"What about –"

"Leave the saucer. I don't think, even if you could power it up, that you could fly it out of range." Lefont glanced at the apparition that existed in his mind. "I don't know what they are after, but if I were in their shoes, I would be denying us any asset we might possibly have. I think their target is that saucer you're in right now."

"Do we have time to do anything? Shoot it down?" Sefeliim asked hopefully.

Lefont shook his head. "No. That UFO is too big. Seems the larger these things are, the better armoured and armed they are, your current grounded UFO being an exception to that rule." He shook his head again and Sefeliim could feel the frustration boil up inside him. "Grab what you can and get out. I want you on the Skyranger in nine minutes, and it to be wheels up immediately after. Get the hell out of Dodge." Sefeliim couldn't make sense of the comment, Lefont saw. "Out of London," he amended.

"Okay." She nodded, and slipped out of sight like a distant dream. Lefont sighed and turned back to the geographic display on the screen before him. Fourteen minutes. She was right, though, damn her. It would have been faster to do a straight orbital drop, but instead they had picked this UFO up visually with a spysat over Africa, heading on a direct line for London. They had been able to track it, had seen camera footage relayed directly from two Libyan Su-24s that had been vectored in to challenge the ship immediately before both ships had been shot down. Thank you CIA for the rapid intercept and forwarding of the footage, he thought to himself as he leaned on the balcony railing, fingers tightening around the bar.

"Damn it, why now? Why not four days ago?" Four days ago, the UFO had landed in Shoreditch Park, and a valiant attempt to rescue school children from the alien abductors had resulted in X-Com managing to take the UFO whole. Four days ago, he had posted guards but otherwise pulled the assault team back for rest, recovery and recuperation. They had taken losses, and had a disturbing discovery with one of the former Kuryu-Kai Squaddies being mentally dominated by one of the aliens and attacking one of her team mates. He had spoken with Suzuka, who was ashamed and not coming out of her room. The base shrink had visited her a few times, but she said little about her embarrassment. Sefeliim had offered to try and help her as well by giving her some exercises to shore up her mental defences, and Lefont resolved to have her speak with Suzuka once she got back and got some rest.

But four days ago, it was just police and regular army guarding the park. They had no assets in the area, nothing that would result in a loss. And now that Sefeliim had gone back to head the team to try to reactivate the craft and bring it to a safe and less-populated location for study... _now_ the damned aliens decided they should pull something.

He waited the anxious minutes until there was less than half a minute left on the clock, and he raised his hand to switch on his direct line to Sefeliim to tell her to get her skinny butt moving, but before his hand reached his earpiece, she spoke across an open channel below in the control area. "Sefeliim and team aboard the Skyranger. Ready for evac at any time."

"Go go go for lift," Sky FCon said into his headset.

"Interceptors pull back to twenty kilometres once Skyguys are away. Watch and learn."

"Wheels up, engines cycling to forward."

"Inform the Police down there to evacuate the park," Lefont spoke to the Comms Officer, who turned back to his desk and keyed into the encrypted frequencies used by the patrolmen in and around the Park.

"All units, all units, please respond to a possible siege near the Hyde Road roundabout."

The Skyranger's external camera showed on a side screen near Lefont the officers patrolling the park responding to calls on their radios, then running from the scene in a north-east direction. He breathed a sigh of relief as he saw the regular Army forces also receive immediate orders from the CommOff desk and move to the south east.

That now just left the UFO in the park, with a series of tarpaulins raised to block it from prying eyes .

Three minutes later, as the first Police responded to their newly-assigned targets, the incoming UFO flew over the park with a deep thrum able to be picked up through the orbiting Interceptors' radio transmissions. The modified F-22X's watched as the UFO slowed almost to a halt, before firing several bright green blobs of superheated plasma into the hidden craft. The recovered UFO exploded, a giant fireball reaching into the heavens and curling around the hovering battleship as shrapnel peppered nearby buildings. For good measure, the UFO sent another three shots down into nearby buildings.

"Stand down, Badger," Lefont heard OpOff say, realising it was the second time the man had said the phrase. "I repeat again, stand down."

"Negative, Ops, I got a target lock and tone. Firing Avalanche. Warhead armed."

"Stand down, Badger! We do not need armed conflict above London!"

Lefont keyed into the channel. "Badger, this is Lead. Stand down, key the missile for destruct."

"Negative Lead," the pilot replied. "They're killing civilians down there. That's not what I signed for. Ready two, fox three, repeat fox three. Warhead armed."

On the screen, Lefont saw the first AMRAAM smack into the side of the battleship, catching it unawares yet doing no damage, but the second missile was incinerated by a green blast before it reached the ship. "Badger, this is Lead. Eject, eject now."

"I've got –"

The channel and video went to static as another blast from the hovering UFO crossed the space between Shoreditch and Badger in seconds, with the Skyranger reporting a moment later they had just seen a flash to the south east of their position as they were directed from London. Lefont's head dropped, his fingers digging deeper into the guardrail. He looked back up to the OpOff down below, whose face was ashen. "Get them home. And get a recovery team out there for Badger. We need that area sealed off and everything recovered."

"Colonel," the OpOff nodded, before turning back to his desk.

"Police channels are reporting that the object over Shoreditch Park is moving off again. Radar reporting the same," CommOff advised.

"Radar showing the object is moving off," came another report.

Lefont heard a knock on a door inside his head, and stepped off the balcony to the corridor outside. "What's happened? Did Badger eject?"

The image of Sefeliim stepped around from behind him with her chin between finger and thumb, looking focussed on something distant. "I cannot sense him. But I have only met him once."

"The horrible thing is, he was right."

"Harrison?"

"None of us signed on to let civilians die. To let anyone die." He slammed his fist into the wall behind him. "Do you know why I signed onto this mission? Why I accepted the role of overall command of X-Com? I was a soldier, I did my bit for Queen and Country, and then... there was a terrorist bombing in Paris in '98. My unit was one of those activated to go in for disaster relief, we went in with the idea we were going to help disaster recovery teams clear streets, shift destroyed buildings and help find survivors and... the bodies of those who weren't so lucky." Lefont closed his eyes remembering. "It's funny. I had fought in wars. The Gulf War. I did time in Somalia. Other African nations that weren't officially engaged in combat and that we weren't officially involved with. I had seen people killed, also killed people personally. I led men into battle, led them on patrol, trained them, wiped their arses and showed them how to tie their boots. I showed them how to make love to their guns and export death to anyone who would bring it to us. But this... this was different."

He took a few steps up the corridor, the illusion of Sefeliim keeping pace but otherwise staying silent. "It was... violent. Ugly. Aggressive. What we had done to other people in the Third World, in enemy nations, was now done to us. Eight blocks, blown up. Thousands dead and injured. Even at the time, directing the efforts and helping where I could to clear debris and bodies, when I had a moment to think I thought there was something unusual about this. I didn't know what. But people were charred like they had been burnt. Extremities showing signs of being vaporised near sites where there were no fires or explosions, people who looked like parts of their bodies had been surgically removed. Survivors reported people moving through the dust and smoke and fires, grabbing people and vanishing into the air – we all put it down to people thinking it was judgement day and that Angels had come and grabbed them."

"Aliens."

The word from Sefeliim had been unexpected, and Lefont started for a moment, a haunted look in his eyes as he turned to her. "Thousands killed, and we blamed religious whackjobs. Fundamentalists living in a cave in Africa or Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Afghanistan, wherever was easy to pronounce for the evening news. We had reports, film of objects in the sky over Paris that day, but no one believed them. I didn't, thought they were all crackpots." Lefont sensed Sefeliim wanted to know what crackpot meant, so he explained further. "Crazy. Insane. It was mad, those days. And then one day, I lifted one of the buildings, and found an arm. It wasn't attached to anything, but it was... weird. Unusual. A greyish-brown. Four fingers, no thumb. It was just... weird. Unusual. I figured it was due to exhaustion that I was missing a wound where the thumb had been or it was someone deformed or something. It was just... yeah. Wrong. It felt wrong. But I didn't know why. I'd just seen too much death and carnage those days to process anything. I handed it off. A week later at our barracks, I had a visit from some gentlemen from one of the agencies. MI5, MI6, I thought at the time, but later found it was MI16. They had some questions about the limb I found. About the things I had seen and heard from the people in Paris. They had questions that I couldn't answer truthfully, but they kept asking until I told them the rumours I'd heard." He shook his head and looked at Sefeliim. "That seemed to satisfy them, and they got up to leave. But I wasn't satisfied. I wanted to know, then, was it Islamic fundamentalists like the media were screaming and our own higher-ups were reporting, or was there something else? I didn't really care either way, but I wanted to go after whomever it was that was really responsible."

"Did they say?"

"No, they didn't. They didn't say a damn thing. They just let me explode, and then they left without saying another word. But I started digging. Mining resources. Hitting the internet in my spare time at the nearest public library, thinking to hide my footsteps. But MI16 were watching, to see if I knew anything more than I had said. I found through conversations with my men that I wasn't the only one to find something, and I wasn't the only one to get a visit, but I was the only one approached officially, on the base. Most had friendly people approach them in bars or on the streets, generally dressed in black, slightly off-putting. Men in black, I recognised the descriptions from my research into UFO lore – because that was where I was getting when looking up things I had heard in Paris."

Lefont broke off again, and stalked to the other end of the corridor shaking his head. "It was – it was terrible. What I thought I knew, I didn't know at all. They approached me six months later, asked me to join a thinktank they were putting together to look into the Paris attack and others besides. My first day on the job, it was my job to go through witness statements. And everyone reported little grey men with big heads and large eyes. Flying discs in the skies. Green death raining from above. The first few reports, I discarded. But by the tenth, I was convinced something was going on. And throughout that first week, I came to believe what I was reading. When I approached the section leader and gave him my read of events from the statements, he was quiet for a while, and then led me to his car, and drove me to a disused warehouse outside London. We went deep underground, to a small facility where I saw people in safe environments, totally closed off from the outside world while they were working, pulling apart machinery the like I had never seen before. And we reached a door, and went in, and there on a gurney was the arm I had recovered. I looked at it as if for the first time, saw it had four fingers, and really had no thumb." Sefeliim flexed her thumb unconsciously in his peripheral vision. "And then, Charles, he... I hadn't realised he'd walked to the back of the room. It was a morgue, with dozens of hatches against the wall, but only two door tags. One, which lay open and the arm had obviously been held in. And another, which he reached out and gripped the handle. He pulled the door open, and slid the tray out. There was a bodybag... and he unzipped it and pulled it aside, and I knew then I could never go back to the Army. It was... it was my first Grey. And I hated it on sight. It meant the death of thousands. Injuries for thousands more. It was horrifying, broke my worldview apart. I'd always, you know, been thinking we'd meet aliens like in Star Trek. They'd look like us, and if they crossed the stars to meet us, they would do so with the best of intentions. Recognise humans as something worthwhile. We'd teach them to shake hands and speak English and they'd show us how to solve global hunger, energy crises, a better way to live with one another. Oh, I guess they did give us that last one, but... this is so not the way I had believed this could ever happen."

"If it's any consolation, it's not how I have experienced my people... from my time," Sefeliim said quietly. "We were peaceful. We did not need to invade or hurt or kill. We just... travelled and explored."

"Even if that was the case sixty four million years ago, it's not now. I joined X-Com because I didn't want to be convincing faceless suits around the world supporting X-Com was the right thing to do. I joined X-Com because it _was_ the right thing to do. The world changed for me that day, in that morgue. Why did they hit us? Why did they attack us? Why would they do any of this? It didn't make sense, but I wanted to be part of the organisation that would stop it from ever happening again. Save people, protect people from the 'real threat' instead of a ghost threat like we're reacting to now in the Middle East. I did this to save lives. But... this isn't saving lives. This is just making more death and destruction."

"That's... what does Sylvia say? That's _bullshit_ and you know it, Harrison." Sefeliim stepped in front of Lefont now, glaring up at him and daring him to look away. "I'm serious. I don't like you killing my people any more than I like helping you do so, but! These are not my people anymore. Whatever they are now, they're cruel and merciless and they will kill. And you can't save everyone. You can't! It's impossible. There are going to be casualties and injuries and massive destruction. You're going to lose people and equipment and you're going to make mistakes and do the wrong thing from time to time and oh god you've had this conversation before," she realised, blushing as Lefont's face broke into a smile.

"Not as passionate, but I have had similar in the past." He looked away, and then back down and rested a hand on her shoulder. "I guess I needed to hear it again. I just... had to tell someone. It hurt me as much as it hurt Badger, and I don't know whether I could have just sat there and watched people get killed. We're trained to not let that happen. It's what we join the Services for! But sometimes, it's best to just sit there and take it, even if afterwards we spend weeks or years looking back and wondering if we did the right thing. Today will just add to that tally for me to look back on later in life."

Sefeliim laid her hand on Lefont's and just smiled, staying silent. A moment later, she slipped from his sight as a door behind Lefont opened and an officer stepped out.

"Sir, Skyranger's coming in for landing."

* * *

Sefeliim trudged off the Skyranger's rear access ramp and onto the hangar floor with both hands carrying heavy bags laden with what equipment she had been able to rip from walls and consoles on their flight from the Shoreditch saucer. Her two trainees were behind her, carrying even more than she was. This wasn't all that had come from Shoreditch, thankfully, but much of the internal structure had been left untouched on the supposition they could reactivate and move the craft from London for further study and they had been left with entertainment devices, consoles and some surgical equipment.

Sefeliim had also authorised the removal of one of the elerium reactors but all the control circuitry had gone up when the craft had been destroyed and only the central reactor core and the elerium remained.

Because she was looking at the floor as she walked, she was surprised when hands grabbed both bags off her. "Sylvia?"

"Monique as well," Sylvia said, tilting her head to the former Moroccan police officer standing silently by her side. De Salver nodded once. Both were dressed somewhat casually for base attire, Sefeliim realised. "We're heading out for the night. You look like you can use a night out. There's a bus from Beckenswood village square in thirty minutes, and Bill's offered to drive us into town."

"Would Bill be coming with us?" Sefeliim asked. She didn't have much to do with Bill Donovan, but he did scare her from time to time, with his size if nothing else. The fact he seemed to be relatively blank to her mind was also unsettling. Donovan stood a few metres away, looking intensely uninterested, but something told Sefeliim he was watching her very carefully. She shook her head. "And I think H... the Colonel might need to speak with me first before I can go anywhere."

"Our high and mighty muckity-muck can wait. Check in, get changed, meet us topside in ten." Sylvia pulled Monique after her towards the equipment lockers with Sefeliim's bags, leaving Donovan along with her in the hangar.

"Pub," he said after a moment.

"I'm sorry?"

"I'm going to the pub. Have a few pints. Shoot some pool. Probably bust some heads in later."

Liam Donaldson walked over, waving at Donovan. "Are you ready?"

"Waiting on Her Highness to check in," Donovan said, turning away and heading after the other women. Sefeliim watched him go, then decided that she did owe herself a night out on the town. If only to actually see human mating rituals and possibly habits in operation.

Sylvia Anderson had been right in her assertion that Lefont wouldn't keep her, Sefeliim found as she stepped from the upper lift entrance and walked from the small shelter across the car park to Donovan's jeep. The others were already inside, the men in the front and the women in the back. Sefeliim found herself sitting in the middle of the back seat as the smallest.

"It's a pity Hiroto couldn't come out."

Sylvia leaned forward as far as her seatbelt would allow her. "Sorry, Liam, she's a bit under the weather still." She glanced back at Sefeliim. "Is she going to be okay?"

Sefeliim nodded. "It's psychic trauma. Something I'm good at dealing with. I'll be going through some routines with her that will help restore her confidence, as well as show her how prepare some mental barriers that will make it harder for it to happen again." Sylvia's face spoke volumes, and Sefeliim got a similar read from both Liam and Monique. "Perhaps I should ask Harrison if I can expand those lessons to anyone who would listen."

Liam nodded vigorously. "I'd make it mandatory for my squad. I hate the idea of some fool being able to play with my head. It's not right."

"Sneak attacks okay with you?" Donovan asked.

Liam smacked him on the shoulder. "That's not the point. You're not making the other side fight for you there except through your own smarts. This, this is like rape. This is... it's _abhorrent_."

"I agree," Sefeliim replied. Oh well, they would soon find out if they attended the classes she was envisioning. "I have some degree of psychic ability, and because I can read most people with ease, just as if it was something I could see with my eyes, the act of subsuming someone's personality with my own is repugnant."

"What?" asked Donovan.

"She hates the idea," Sylvia translated.

"You can read minds?" Liam asked.

"Kind of. It's more... more I hear voices." Sefeliim tried to tone down her actual abilities. "Like... you might be saying something to be vocally, but I can hear another voice, just as clear, saying what you're really meaning or really thinking. I know people aren't comfortable with knowing this can be done, though, so I try not to listen." She shrugged. "I believe you are all capable of the same, but rely on your other senses. It's something I'd like to experiment with."

"Scouting's a dangerous job," Liam said after a minute's silence. "I'd like to try that, I think. Get inside the heads of the people I'd trying to ID. You know, see where they are, through their eyes. Does it work like that?"

"If you're strong enough mentally, and skilled enough, yes it can."

Sylvia noticed the jeep was slowing down, and that Donovan was looking off to the right. "Bill? What's up?"

Donovan was silent for a few more seconds, then pointed out the window. "I think I just saw something over there. I don't know. Might be imagining it." He stopped the jeep and put it in park. The hillside they were on was bleak, and there were no other vehicles on the small road at this time of the evening. As Base Europa at the former mining site at the top of the hill was all that was around for miles, that wasn't surprising, but what was surprising was a light that blinked on several hundred metres away, and then blinked off a few seconds later. As they watched quietly, the occupants of the jeep realised that the light was cyclic, and lighting the top of a low domed vehicle.

"Shit," Liam grunted, undoing his seatbelt. "They've found us."

Sylvia quietly slipped from the vehicle, reaching up under her dress and pulling out a pistol. Monique pulled her cherished police 9mm pistol from her small handbag, and Liam and Donovan both reached under their seats for shotguns before quietly easing themselves out of the jeep.

"Do you have a gun?" Sylvia asked Sefeliim in a quiet tone. Sefeliim shook her head. "Damn. Well, stay back here."

Sefeliim got out of the jeep silently herself, looking indignant. "If you're all creeping around the hills in the dark hunting aliens, no _way_ am I staying in the car.

Donovan gave her a hard look. "Then stay close behind me." Sefeliim nodded meekly and got in behind his broad back as the group crossed the road. She projected forward a sense that there was nothing of any interest here, nothing to see, nothing to mind, and hoped that what she was projecting was able to be received and understood. If the mental operating system of any entities around them was sufficiently unlike them, or guarded against psychic intrusion, her efforts might be useless. She shook her head mentally to clear the negative thoughts. _This would work._

Monique picked her way to the right, careful measured footsteps across anything that might make noise and give them away. Liam took the far left, moving faster than Monique, more sure-footed and also quieter, while Donovan and Sylvia brought up the middle.

They approached to within one hundred metres of the UFO, and saw it was a small affair, a dome on four telescoping legs. There appeared to be a column of light underneath the UFO, similar to the gravitic lifts in the Shoreditch craft. The UFO itself only seemed to be a few metres across, and had only been spotted by pure luck.

There were no aliens in sight.

The X-Com agents relaxed, but Sefeliim felt something, a warning, and spun around in time to see a massive fist descending towards her head. She opened her mouth to scream, and felt her legs swept out from under her as Donovan spun and moved in one fluid motion, surprising for one so big. He blocked the fist with his shotgun, the impact bending the barrel.

Donovan swore loudly as the massive beast pulled its fist back, and used the moment to throw the ruined shotgun to one side while pulling a pistol from his belt and began firing at the beast's head. Sylvia also began shooting, and Monique and Liam began to head in to engage the alien also.

Sefeliim scrabbled backwards on the ground in panic, trying to get some distance between her and the alien, but the massive thing roared and stepped forward. She looked into its head, and found nothing but empty anger – normally there was something here, some presence, but whatever control mechanism this being was used by wasn't present. She could use that.

The purple monster savagely pushed Donovan aside, ignoring his small arms fire, and stalked towards Sefeliim, who threw her hands up in a defensive posture while trying to unravel the control mechanisms present in its head. It raised its fist again, and as it dropped it towards her head, she gave up on trying to hotwire its brain and instead grabbed the alien in a psychic grip. "Shoot it! Shoot it now!"

Small arms fire spattered off the alien's back, while Sefeliim began to sweat from the effort of holding such a huge force of nature back. She couldn't move, such was her concentration on gripping the monster. Then Liam's shotgun boomed, and she felt the alien weaken against her grasp, and the other barrel boomed as well, and the toughened skin cratered. Monique stepped in them, and poked her pistol into the shallow wound in the beast's back and fired three times.

The alien stiffened, and grew enraged. It tore through Sefeliim's hold and backhanded Monique with a glancing blow before she could get clear. Donovan had run off, and Sefeliim couldn't see him over the long grass, but she scrambled back behind the UFO before dodging around to check on Monique. The Moroccan was fine, just dazed and would likely have a massive bruise to show for the slap – she was lucky Sefeliim's hold had managed to slow the slap to something survivable. Liam's shotgun spoke again and again, making a clack-clack sound as he ejected shells and slotted new ones into the barrels before snapping the shotgun shut and firing again. The weapon had little effect on the alien, though, and it was ready to take the fight to the X-Com agents, but Sefeliim felt something change then in the space around them.

It felt... wrong somehow, as if time and space had been turned to treacle and she was being forced to wade through it. A powerful psychic presence, able to best her in her current state if she wasn't careful. The alien stopped brawling, and looked back to the small saucer before back at them. It seemed to shrug, and turned for its craft, stepping into the light under the craft and rising up through the bottom floor.

Moments before the gravitic lift shut off, someone huge thundered past Sefeliim. Donovan took a leap at the bottom of the saucer, throwing something forward into the light with both hands. What looked like a half dozen sticks with round rings on them fell to the ground around Donovan as he rolled and ran away from the craft, even as half a dozen egg-shaped objects ceased their forward motion as they hit the lift beam, and then rose through the floor of the saucer.

Barely a second later, the UFO exploded into pieces, and collapsed on its telescoping legs before rolling partway down the hill.

"What the hell -?"

"Grenades, Liam, me old chap," Donovan grinned as he stood up and dusted himself off. The action seemed to have woken him into life, instead of the distant figure he had been earlier in the night. "Always keep 'em in the jeep in case something happens. And tonight, something did."

Sylvia groaned out loud.

"What? Are you hurt?" Sefeliim asked, getting up to check both Sylvia and Monique. Monique started laughing, followed by Liam shortly after.

"No, I'm not hurt," Sylvia said. "But shortly, when we call base, and tell them what happened, and they cancel all leave for the next two weeks, _then_ I'll be hurt."

"Oh."

* * *

By the next morning, the UFO was safely ensconced underground, in a spare hangar with the equipment from the Shoreditch saucer. Lefont looked disappointed as Sefeliim stepped up to him.

"It wasn't our fault entirely," she started. He waved her off.

"What happened, happened. If you couldn't stop the alien, what else could you do?" Lefont's eyes dropped to a folder he held that contained photos of the alien's corpse. After the explosion of the saucer, not much remained bar a few scraps of purple skin and some interesting, but ultimately useless, machinery. "Do we know whether they knew where the craft was?"

Sefeliim shook her head. "I don't think so. I think it had landed at random to take readings from the local area, and the data would have been examined once it returned to the mothership. They may know roughly where the ship was, but they won't know everything. They may only have a general idea of what country the craft was in when it was destroyed."

Lefont frowned. "Or they may know exactly where it was. We've got one Interceptor left now. The Skyranger. Nothing else with aerial capabilities. Some ground-to-air defences up top, but we're effectively defenceless. And they may know where we are."

"I don't think they do. No more than they knew already. But you're right, I can't be one hundred percent certain of that."

Lefont turned away from the wreckage. "I've got to cancel off-base passes for the next week at least, maybe two or three."

"That's understandable. But, is there anything we can do here then? Maybe have a disco or something."

Lefont stopped, and looked down at the small Asian woman. "I'm sorry, what? What are you watching on TV these days?"

"Never mind. I just mean – is there something we can do to let people blow off steam?"

"A base party, perhaps." The Colonel wasn't sure, really. There wasn't anything he could think of that would allow a party to be held. Being stuck on base wasn't the worst thing that could happen, but being stuck so far underground with the possibility of being buried down there preyed on his mind.

"I could have a birthday," Sefeliim suggested slowly. "I have to have one eventually. And I want it to have lots of strawberry ice cream. _Lots,_ Harrison, simply lots."

"Make it so, then. Pick a date and let me know." He started back for the base corridors, heading for the command centre. "For now, I also need to organise a trip. After we do a lot of research. And I'm going to want you there for that."

Sefeliim cocked her head to one side. "What's going on?"

Lefont opened the entrance to the base corridors, and paused to let Sefeliim precede him through. "We've been in operation for several months now. The Council that provide us our funding have decided to give us a funding increase, seeing our success in the Shoreditch incident. Even taking into account the end of that."

"Is this something good?" Sefeliim asked.

"Something very good. We've been asked to set up a new interception base somewhere else in the world, and I need your help in selecting where we're going to place it."

"Groovy."

To be continued.

Authors notes:

Wow, it took a while to get back to this fic. I always intended on continuing it, but I haven't been writing very much lately, and as this is a secondary fic to the main ones I've been writing over the years it has suffered in terms of attention. However, I hope this chapter goes some way to rectifying that. There may be more in the middle future rather than the far future (can't stop writing, Lobsterman might eat me). At this point, it's still early in the X-Com timeline, and things will start happening in the next few chapters that will heat up this secret war. Hopefully, it will all go according to plan, and X-Com will come out on top. Go team X-Com!


	7. XCom 7

DISCLAIMER: Relatively standard stuff. Existing character types (specifically the alien races), certain vehicles and buildings, and so forth are properties of Microprose or whomever now holds the rights (2k Marin?). As the characters are original, the characters are my property, and so's the story (but plot for events belongs to Microprose or current other owner), hence ownership and copyright of them belongs to me. Contact me at .au if you want permission to use anything I've written for whatnot purposes.

**X-COM: Enemy Unknown**

** By Raymond Cooper**

_**Open Minds, Safe Places**_

The house on Trailing Heart Road in Roswell was unassuming. Faded red brick, white roof, with a small lawn that was cut every couple of weeks. Unfortunately, it was only nearly ready for another cut at the present, and the grass had grown slightly too much to look neat. Outside currently, in the drive and on the side of the road were a dozen vehicles of various makes. An old Thunderbird, lovingly restored, parked next to a Porsche. Two cheap Mazdas were parked side by side. A utility vehicle had parked on the other side of the street. Two motorcycles were parked up the drive, either side of a red Datsun that had seen better days. One neighbour, an elderly woman, looked on and tut-tutted as she watered her front garden.

Inside the house, the lounge was full of people. Most were sitting, either on chairs, one of the two couches or simply on the floor. They were of all types, ages and sizes. Two young black men sat on one of the couches, a blond-haired Scandinavian next to them, an elderly woman with a cane resting against her knees in one of the chairs, an Asian woman sitting cross-legged on the floor, three boys of high school age of Mexican descent, a white-haired man in his late forties in overalls with grease marks on his face where he hadn't cleaned after work.

Others moved about slowly, talking in low tones while drinking or taking snacks from the table in the dining room behind them or from the coffee table in the middle of the lounge. At the front of the room, a large TV sat in a wooden unit, hooked up to a DVD player. A laptop computer also sat on the coffee table, with some rough JPEG images of streaks of light in blue skies on the screen.

One of the men, a redhead with a smattering of freckles across his nose moved to the head of the room from where he had been talking quietly with someone in the back. He raised his voice for the audience. "Uh... I'd like to thank you all for coming here today. I know some of you have come from a bit further than Roswell, so I'd like to say hi to Pete," he gestured at the overall-clad man, "from Corona, we've got Jayne," a woman gave a nervous quick little wave at the people around her before sinking back, "from Lubbock, and there's my brother," finally he gestured at the other redhead in the room, "Who's come interstate from Portland. Oh, and my name's Jeff. We're all here today to talk about the UFO phenomenon. Unidentified flying objects. So, definitely not swamp gas or Venus." Jeff laughed nervously. There were a few chuckles around the room. "I know there are a few here who have come with friends or partners, so I guess a little explanation is in order. We're an informal group, having met mostly online first of all with stories to share. We've got our own discussion group on Yahoo where we meet regularly and talk about our experiences or things we've seen in the news or books. About UFOs. Now, some of you who are new may be wondering why we're here. Well, Roswell has a fairly large history with regards to UFOs. You've probably heard of the Roswell flying saucer crash from 1947. What you probably haven't heard about is the Corona crash, also nearby, around the same time. Or the Lubbock Lights of the 50s, or any of the other strange activity in this region. For whatever reason, alien spacecraft have been seen in these regions for a long time."

"Now," Pete said, leaning forward, "I don't personally think these are 'alien spacecraft' at all. And this is why Jeff was up until now using the term UFO. Because there's a lot more than one possible cause behind these events."

"What do you favour?" one of the black men asked.

"High altitude airbourne life forms," Pete replied. "I've seen tube worms and flat fish and skywhales in my time."

The black man looked unconvinced and shrugged. "To each their own, I guess. Jonathon and I, and I'm Andrew, for those who don't know, think these are nothing more than secretive aircraft being tested by the US Air Force. I think the lights over Groom Lake and Tonopah prove that. We've seen those. They don't actually display much in the way of extreme aerial manoeuvrability. That's just guff alien spacemen like to peddle." Jonathon nodded agreement.

"We also have a special guest today," Jeff hurried back into the conversation, trying to derail what looked like a situation that would devolve into an argument. "This person is intimately involved in dealing with extra-terrestrials. Intimately." Jeff let that sink in for a moment. The Asian frowned, while everyone else ranged from shock to guarded interest. "But first, I would like to ask those of us who are new to the group to say a little bit about themselves. Give us something to go on, who you are, what you do, what you think of the phenomenon, no matter your stance. You'll find we get a little heated sometimes in our debating and discussions but we all respect each others' views."

A blonde woman of about twenty stood. She held a small book tightly in her hands. "I guess I should go first. I live locally now, uh, my name's Karen, Karen Endicott, and I live locally now." Karen paused to mentally regroup. "I saw something when I was younger and it set off an interest in aliens. I saw ET, uh, the movie, you know, by Spielberg and I liked it but, uh, it wasn't the movie I saw."

"Take your time, Karen," Jonathon said gently.

Karen gave him a crooked smile. "It's my first time. Telling this, I mean. My friends, they saw it as well, well, two of them did but they never said anything. I was out with two friends, and we were hiking. When I was a kid we lived in Washington, near a logging area and my friends and I would, we'd go walking in the forests. Sometimes we'd find where loggers had been with all the trees pulled down and removed and stuff but mostly we stuck to animal trails and streams. This one day, well, we were walking and we went into this area where the trees had been taken out and there was a, a thing in the... in the clearing. I mean, this clearing was big, where they'd taken the trees from was a few miles across but it was away from everything, and there was this big... cake-shaped thing. It was like... metal or something, and it was about three stories tall or something, we didn't see anything nearby to give it scale. There were some people around it, and they got in and it left. Just went upwards, no light, no sound and vanished into the sky. My friends, we ran, and ran, and really ran and didn't stop until we got home."

Andrew leaned forward. "Did it look like a VTOL plane? With wings and tail fins?"

"Are you sure it wasn't organic?" Pete asked, shooting a glare at Andrew.

"N-no, no to both of you. It was a machine, but I've never seen anything like it before," Karen said. She pulled the book away from her chest and nervously touched it with one hand, stroking the cover almost as if it were Pandora's Box. "I drew it," she said in a small voice. She flipped the book open, and hesitantly handed the book to the Asian, who studied the image intently.

"It really does look like a cake," the Asian said, flipping through several pages and seeing pictures of the people Karen had mentioned. They appeared short and slightly squat, with big heads and black eyes. "A layer cake. Now I'm hungry," she said, distracted as she passed the book to someone and leaned forward to take some food from the coffee table.

"This is classic misdirection here," Andrew said when he received the book, glancing at the people Karen had drawn. "See this? This is a classic 'Grey'. A Reticulan. One of the fakes dreamed up by PsyOps teams working for the NSA to cover for secret Air Force testing of Aurora."

Karen looked disheartened, but the Asian gave him a withering look and jumped to Karen's defence. "Were you there? Did you see what she saw? Chances are you weren't one of the friends she said were with her. Her memories may be right or wrong, but that's obviously what she recalls."

"Thank you," Karen said in a small voice before sinking back into a chair. Jeff nodded his thanks for defusing the situation.

"I guess since I spoke up, I should be next," the Asian said, standing and turning to nod at everyone, making eye contact as she did so. "My name is Tsukiko. I also come from a way away... I come from Japan originally, have any of you ever been to Niigata?" She looked around again, saw everyone shaking their heads. "Oh, that's a shame. I was born there. I work as a programmer now in DC."

"Do you work for the government?" the old lady asked. "Only I met them once and they weren't very nice."

Tsukiko shook her head. "No, no, I work for a company called Bethesda. I make computer games for a living. Maybe you've heard of us?"

One of the high school boys put a hand up. "You made the Terminator games," he said.

"That's right," Tsukiko replied. "And DC, well, DC has its own history of UFOs. But mine happened... when I was a child as well. In Niigata. It was winter, and I was playing outside on dusk. I looked up, and saw a disk there, just hanging. Looked to be a dozen metres or so across, it wasn't very big. It was there for a few moments, and then it just... was gone." Tsukiko shrugged. "As stories go, it's not as dramatic as yours, Karen. No aliens or people, no flashes of flight, no strange noises, no pulsating sensations in my body. No radiation poisoning, either. I did hit puberty a few months later, but I don't think that was related at all."

"Are you making fun of us?" one of the others asked.

Tsukiko shook her head definitively. "No. Certainly not. My experience might not be exciting, but it was something I couldn't explain, and no one else could either. My father tried to tell me it was the moon, but it wasn't the moon." Tsukiko sat down again. "Sorry, it's just not exciting. I don't even have a drawing of how it looked, so I can't be one hundred percent certain that my memory wouldn't be playing tricks if I tried to draw it now."

"That's fine," Jeff said, and gestured at one of the others. "And you?"

"I read some books in the last few years," another man said, standing and nodding at the crowd. "My name's Jim Anderson, I live down on West Poe. So yeah. I read some books about the Dropa tribe in Tibet, and the Roswell crash, and Socorro landing and stuff. And it really interested me, you know? I was in the army in the 80s and I was stationed in Germany for a while. Now, I never saw anything, but two of my friends came running into the barracks one morning, excited. They'd just seen a flying disk zip past, went by with a whoosh. Some of the other guards on duty that morning said they saw the same thing. Kinda got me interested in the subject, so I'm more here to learn more than I am anything else, I guess."

Slowly, they went around the room and introduced a few other people, including those who had lived in Roswell for some time, as well as being part of the existing group.

"I lived in Kecksburg in 1965," one older woman, Maree, announced. "I was just a girl, but my poppy got me up and took me out in the snow. It was cold, but I went with him, he said he had something exciting to show me. I was only eight at the time. We went out into the woods, and there was something there. A little fire, but the snow and the cold had put a lot of that out. But there was this thing like an acorn. Silver, it was, kind of like burnished steel. And there was writing around it, but I never could understand it. Not long after, the Army turned up with trucks and guns, and ordered everyone out of the woods." Maree looked into the distant past. "They drove a big flatbed truck out again a few hours later, with a large tarpaulin over the object on the back." She smiled. "I also didn't draw a picture, but I remember vividly what the object looked like."

"Kecksburg, for those who don't know," Jeff said once Maree had fallen quiet, "is one of the better-known and recorded UFO retrieval operations. The Air Force has collected these craft - or objects, for those who don't believe in little green or grey men – since at least Roswell in 1947. Now, you'll hear a lot in the media that Roswell was a weather balloon, or a MOGUL balloon designed to detect Soviet nuclear testing, but the fact remains there have been a lot of witnesses come forward to testify about what they saw."

"Not one of them is credible after thirty years of saying nothing," Andrew sniffed.

"Now hold on, I don't think it was a flying saucer or nothing," Pete interjected. "But the fact remains a lot of these witnesses have been military men. Including the press officer who first broke the story, and the base intelligence officer."

"Haut just didn't want to be called a liar," Andrew retorted. "We've spoken with military sources on the matter, and hey, they've confirmed it wasn't an alien spaceship. It was a bomber flying from Walker AFB, with an atomic bomb. Part of the 509th, it went down. That was why there was all the cover story and everything. It's really not something the Air Force want getting out, they've got enough downed nukes around the planet already."

One of the school kids shook his head. "Man, you're crazy. No way what that farmer found was a plane. Tinfoil and balsa wood, remember? And paper."

"That just reinforces the weather balloon theory."

"Nah, but no. The base intelligence officer and base commander would have known what a weather balloon was. Even if it was an experimental super-secret balloon, they would have recognised it as something from here, something made by humans. The fact they didn't, that just screams extra-terrestrial."

Andrew leaned back to peer upside down at the kid over the back of the couch. "Were _you_ there?" he asked, turning Tsukiko's argument against the high schooler. "I mean, really, were any of us there? Did any of us see the debris or the second crash site closer to town where they found the actual craft and bodies? No? Didn't think so."

Tsukiko had felt the old woman behind her shift and glanced back. "Are you okay, ma'am?"

The woman smiled kindly. "I'm fine, dear. Just gas. Farting like a trooper."

"Granma!" Jeff's brother whispered.

Tsukiko gave a quirky smile. "She's fine."

"I just think it's a lot more likely that it was either a bomber, and the second crash site was where the bomb ended up," Andrew continued, quieter, "or that it was what they said. I mean, who knows? Maybe Kecksburg was really something other than that Russian satellite, and maybe something really did come down at Laredo. Fact is, these things could have been anything. Small aircraft, weather balloons, alien spacecraft, deflating exotic upper-atmosphere life forms, even experimental aircraft being test-flown or missiles."

"So many of these things have been seen around military bases and aircraft testing areas," Jonathon added. "Remember, everyone in Panama thought the stealth fighter was an alien spacecraft because they didn't hear much and all they saw were silent lights in the sky."

"Aurora's been disproven," Pete sniffed. "Maybe you missed that top secret memo."

"We have some footage!" Jeff interrupted again. "I've got it cued up to go on my DVD player." He picked up a remote and turned the television on, then picked up another remote and activated the DVD player.

"Dude," the second high schooler said derisively, "don't you have a universal remote?"

"Jeff spends all his money on books and magazines," the old woman sniffed back a smile. "Always reading, my Jeff. Like someone else I knew once. Always reading about the world around him. He followed the alien spacecraft movement himself as well, you know, their grandfather. In the Fifties, he dragged me off to some desert camp where we got high as kites and made love in the shade of parked cars while waiting for the aliens to come."

"Granma," Jeff's brother asked again. "Please. Enough."

"Well, the aliens didn't come. Their Pop did, though."

"Granma!"

"I've got the DVD working!" Jeff announced loudly while ignoring the bright red of his skin. Several people smirked behind their hands. Tsukiko gave Jeff's grandmother another smile.

"You had a very happy life," she said.

"I had an exciting life," the woman replied. "Very... exciting and unique. I'll tell you about it, one day." She nodded at the Japanese woman.

"I'd like that, thanks," she replied with a nod as she turned back to Jeff and the working TV.

"This was shot over Geneva about a year ago. The video hit the internet a while back and... well, check it out." Jeff hit play, and the video jumped into life. It was a clear day, blue sky, and the camera was focussed on the sky to the exclusion of almost everything else. The cornice of a roof poked into view on the left of the screen. After a few moments, with some muttered conversation muted and distorted by the quality of the video to sound tinnier than was normal.

"Wait, what's that?" someone said clearly. A finger stabbed upwards into the shot. "There," said the same voice. From the right, spinning into shot, came a disk-shaped object. It was silvery, with some raised bits and what looked like a red light underneath on the lowest section. Lines appeared apparent, as if the object was panelled.

"Oh my god! It's the aliens!" said another voice. Someone laughed off-camera. The disk continued on a slightly parabolic course until it disappeared over the roof. The camera tracked it slightly, but only a little bit. Jeff hit the pause again on the remote.

"That's about where it cuts off. There's some more speaking but you can't make anything out." Jeff looked back at the screen, then stepped the video backwards until the disc appeared without any blur from transitional frames being caught. "This seems to be the classic disk reported by people. I have some thoughts on this, but I'd like to throw this open to everyone, see what they think."

Pete leaned in to have a closer look. "Looks kinda like a flat fish, but they're more rectangular. And they don't spin. Doesn't look organic, neither."

The third of the high schoolers went to say something, then stopped as the first grabbed his arm and shook his head. Jeff reversed the video to where the disk first appeared and stuck it on a slow-motion frame-by-frame view. "Anyone else?"

Jim shook his head. "I'd say that's proof of alien life right there. It's obviously a structured craft. It's been machined. You don't get straight lines like that in nature. There's probably beings in it. I don't know, maybe those Grey things."

Tsukiko glanced at him. "That's an overwhelmingly definite statement from little evidence. You don't have _any_ doubt?"

"Nup. I've read enough in my life to know that's the real deal right there." Jim folded his arms and challenged anyone to offer a differing opinion. Andrew seemed only too ready to interject.

"It's obviously a fake."

"And how do you come to that conclusion?"

"The camera was set up to watch it come over," Andrew said.

Jonathon added, "And the finger pointing up wasn't even pointing at it, it was pointing straight up."

Jeff stopped the DVD on a specific frame, happy he'd found what he was looking for. The third high schooler settled down.

Andrew continued. "And the object looked like it was painted sloppily. There's one bit there you see what is obviously a blob of paint." He looked at Jeff. "And what do you think?"

"I'll let Bert respond," Jeff said and turned to the high schooler.

"Uh..." Caught on the spot, Bert hesitated and blushed. "Uh, it says 'frisbee' on one of the inner rings. They've painted over it but it catches the light at one bit. They've glued two Frisbees together."

Jeff smiled and nodded at the high schooler. "That's right. Although, I don't think they glued it together. What they appear to have done is wrap duct tape around the edges. This video came from Geneva, supposedly, but we don't see anything else in the video, so we've only got the source's assertion to go from. This video is still being debated online – I know of two people who think the alien pilots painted the word 'frisbee' on it so if they were captured on film no one would believe the witnesses." He moved on to the next video. "This one was taken in the Mexico flap of ninety-seven. You've all seen the big disk or cigar moving behind buildings in Mexico City? Well, this is a smaller object seen through a window for a time." He hit play, and the video started, showing a slightly fuzzy black shape that didn't appear to be moving at first, but then showed itself to be wobbling. "Rather than discuss this one, I'll just say – this is obviously something painted on the outside of the window. It stays in the same place relative to the camera, and the illusion of movement is caused by the camera moving slightly. It's small enough movement that everything outside seems to stay in the same place, but enough that the painting or drawing stuck on the window, being much closer to the lens, seems to be moving a lot more. The camera also seems to be focussed on the view outside, so the object itself, much closer, is out of focus."

"That is so lame," the second schoolkid spoke up.

"That someone feels they need to validate themselves by doing this... yeah. Yeah, they're pretty bad people somewhere inside," Jeff agreed.

"Maybe..." Karen spoke up, a little hesitantly, "maybe they saw something another time, and this was the only way they could make people believe they had seen something. Make a video that looks like what they saw, show it to family and friends to convince them. Maybe the family know it's a fake, but someone sees the chance for money or something, and... goes out to make money."

"We don't know," Tsukiko agreed. "Could be; might just be a hoax as well."

"I knew that one was a fake," Jim asserted with a dismissive snort.

Jeff started the next video. "This came from Russia, about two months ago." The camera footage was grainy, shot at night next to a road. Business signs in Cyrillic lettering lined the streets, and snow was scattered lightly on the ground, but there was mostly a good view of the road and the sky above. "This was shot from a traffic camera in Moscow. Give it a few seconds and... there!"

A bright light shot past above the street.

"That's just a fighter jet doing something stupid," Andrew said. A moment later, several fighter jets did race past, slightly slower than the light they were following.

"No, those are fighter jets," Jim said.

"That looks like a lamp-ray," Pete said, leaning forward through the slo-mo replay. "It's kind of a flattened circle – kind of like a disk – with a tail behind it. And they glow. So, lamp-ray. But you usually see them in shuttle camera footage or something, they're exclusively upper-atmopsheric."

"Online measurements are giving a height of maybe two hundred feet, maybe three, depending on whether anything has slightly magnified the jets or not. They're down low," Jeff informed Pete.

"It looks genuine – in that there's something there," Andrew clarified. "But it might be –"

"Aurora?" Bert snickered.

"No, I was going to say a Russian top secret plane."

"Being chased by Russian fighter jets?"

"Being _escorted_ by Russian fighter jets. Like that thing over London a few weeks ago. That was an experimental Russian plane, let me tell you, just like that, and it blew up part of London."

Jeff moved on, ignoring the last statement. "And now, to the best thing I've been able to dig up. I know last meeting we talked a little about covert groups within the CIA and NSA tracking UFOs and everything. But I found some references in FOI documents recently that suggested there was something going on with the FBI a few decades ago. There's this." He let the DVD player go again and the video switched to a black and white piece that had deteriorated over time. The occasional frame was missing or whited out from exposure, and the image looked to be fuzzy blown up onto the large TV screen.

It seemed to be a home movie of some description. Two kids were playing in the front yard of a wooden house, porch railing being leant on by a woman with immaculate hair and an apron over her dress. She was saying something and the children appeared to be laughing, but there was no sound. "Now, before anyone says anything – this came without sound. Except for a few short snatches and then again right at the end. I'm not sure why."

In the sky, clouds seemed to be warping and twisting, but the camera didn't pan up to investigate. The cameraman, presumably the man of the household, continued filming the children. A car pulled up, black and foreboding, with an FBI logo stencilled on the side. The camera panned around to view it as the doors opened and men in suits climbed out, pulling guns with them. The sound came on for an instant, and the room heard the children scream and footsteps as they ran for the house, and even as they saw the lead agent point at the house while looking at the camera, they heard his voice, "-back inside and stay-"

Now the camera seemed to realise something was up with the sky. The clouds spun and danced into a disk-shaped formation, spinning like an accretion disk of some kind. And through the eye in the centre of the formation a bright light speared down. The light hit the road surface about sixty metres from the cameraman, and again the sound dropped in as the chunks and particles of the road surface leapt up into the air and began reforming from damaged sections of roadway into something tall, full of hard shapes and angles. "-inside, inside now; Henderson, get the –"

The sound dropped out, and the object completed forming as the light died away. It was a tall obelisk, and right at the very top something seemed to twinkle before another light lanced down from the monolith at the road. The sound came on again as the light hit the road surface, and all anyone could hear was a piercing shriek and muffled bangs of explosions as the road surface was blown apart, with the line of light tracking towards the FBI car.

At this point, the cameraman panicked, and turned to run, and a moment later the film cut off.

Jeff stopped the video. "I'm going to let my brother Rick explain this one. He's the one who managed to find the video, and did all the footwork on the investigation. Rick?" Everyone turned to Jeff's brother in the back of the room. He looked a little uncomfortable.

"We'd been hearing about UFO sightings from the Fifties that were being investigated by Men in Black, like everyone knows. Not the Will Smith type, these guys were threatening and assaulted people, tailed witnesses... we figured it sounded like the FBI under Hoover. Anyway, I managed to hear about something that happened in Walla Walla, Washington state, so I went out and tried looking and asking around to see what I could find. No one knew of any aliens or UFOs or anything, but there was a gas main explosion everyone could remember from 1952. I went to check it out in the library, and yeah. There was a street, eight homes destroyed, about two hundred feet of the road ripped up to a depth of about eight feet, just excavated completely." Rick pulled his hands back to his side, as they had been growing more animated the more he spoke. After a few moments, he leaned on them to stop moving them. "There was also reference to an FBI vehicle that was destroyed in the blast, and several field agents who had been injured. Two were killed outright. Looking at the references Jeff had looked up, and the freedom of information releases, I was able to link one of the agent names, John Hancock, from this gas main explosion to a small special group known as XCOM. There was only one reference in the papers to this group, and the name seems to have been a nickname given within the Bureau as they do call it the 'External Counterterrorist Operations Management' team in the same sentence. So, I started wondering what early counterterrorist teams were going in Washington, and why they got blown up in a gas main explosion. But what if it was a domestic terror cell or something they had stumbled on?"

Tsukiko finally shifted around to look at Rick.

"I started looking for people who lived in the affected street at the time. The papers mentioned a few survivors, gave names. I was able to hunt down one man who still lived in Walla Walla, and it turned out he had something that his father had gotten his hands on. It was the film footage we just saw. He didn't let me have it, but did let me copy it. I think he was worried I would make it 'disappear'."

"Was he one of the people from the video?" Karen asked.

Rick shook his head and walked up to the TV, getting Jeff to step back as the cameraman turned back towards the street in reverse. He pointed at the house next to the one the children were playing in. "He said this was his family's house, I think. They were neighbours, and the father of this family in the house in front, he gave his father the film footage in the Sixties before they moved away from Walla Walla for good." Rick stopped the DVD and handed the remote back to Jeff.

"This was a real find," Jeff said, excited.

Andrew was silent. Jonathon shook his head. "I don't know what that thing was. It looked... unreal. Faked, maybe."

"They can do a lot of things with computer graphics these days," Bert said, dubiously. "But I think that was the real thing. I just don't know what it was."

"Nah, has to be a fake," Jonathon said, louder, more confident now he'd thought about it. "We'd have heard about something like that."

"The documents we had provided suggested this wasn't an isolated incident. The guest we were talking about today was John Hancock, but... he should have been here by now."

Rick leaned up against the wall and looked at the floor, hands behind him again. "The guy I spoke to who lived in this street, he'd have told you that this was real. They were in their front room, and saw the burst of light, saw the ground... he said 'rebuild' into this obelisk and begin firing, and like the survivors, they ran out the back once the explosions started. But he said no one else in the street had seen anything, except their neighbour who filmed it."

"I didn't think home cameras in the Fifties had sound?" Jonathon pressed.

"He says the neighbour was a 'tinkerer'. Always making little things that were useful."

There was a honk from the street outside, and Tsukiko stirred. "I'm sorry guys, I'd like to stay but that's my ride."

"You can tell from the horn?" Karen asked.

"It's a distinctive horn." She stood and straightened her pants. "It has really been lovely meeting you all. I'd like to come back some time if I'm ever in the area again."

"Oh, yeah, sure," Jeff replied, stepping forward to help lead her from the lounge to the door. Jeff's grandmother shooed him back down.

"I'll show her out," she said, grabbing her cane and leaning on it as she stood. Tsukiko helped her out, and allowed herself to be led outside. On the road was a nondescript car, with a blond-haired man in dark sunglasses peering out at her. Tsukiko waved at him happily. "That's your _special_ friend?" Jeff's grandmother asked.

"Oh, hahaha, nothing like that," Tsukiko assured the older woman. "He's... we're just friends."

"I've heard that wistful tone before, you know." The woman sighed wistfully herself as she pulled the door closed behind her for privacy from the crowd inside. "You don't even know you sound like that. Wanting something and don't know how to go about it, because it's all different to what you know and how you've acted in the past."

"Uh..."

"Oh come now, you're in Roswell." The woman snorted. "Most people hereabouts might poo-pooh the idea but those of us who have been around for a while, we know. We _know. _Or I do, at least. I'm Rachel."

"I'm –"

"If you're name is Sue Ki-ki or whatever you said in there, I'm a horse's ass. And I assure you I wasn't when I looked in the mirror this morning."

"Sef. My name's Sef." _Crazy alien cat woman is out of the bag..._

"You could have said that in there."

"Oh, but 'moon child' was so poetic..."

"Only poetic if people know what you're talking about, kid." Rachel glanced again at the car. "Ahh, soldier boys. I went through a lot of them as a girl, you know."

"You killed them?" Sefeliim asked, confused.

"No, although I think in Chinese I gave them lots of 'little deaths'." At Sefeliim's continued confused stare, Rachel explained further. "I blew them. I blew a lot of... what do you kids call this these days?" She tapped the side of her head. Sefeliim tapped the mental image.

"Oh, pornography. That's what we call that now."

"Oh, you're so innocent. It's so cute. It was cute with Charlie, as well."

"What do you mean?" Sefeliim's eyes narrowed.

Rachel laughed. "Charlie Wang, my little Chinaman. Not so much a Yellow Menace as much as a Grey Menace. Lived in his head, poor fellow. My Charlie."

"You..."

"Roswell has been visited before by your kind. You with the government?" Rachel asked again.

Sefeliim shook her head. "No. No, that's maybe not entirely true, but we act independently of governments. I can't say anything more, though."

"I know you're not like those others that Rick and Jeff have found out about. Cold, impersonal, dead." Rachel shook her head. "You're so much like Charlie. He was your height. Looked like a Chinaman. But he had the most beautiful eyes... I can see them in you, too. Eyes like the sweetest, most loving chocolate you ever could lay your hands on."

"Thank you."

"His ship crashed here in Forty-Seven, July. His three friends were killed in the crash... he rarely spoke of them, said they all tried to get away from... something. He told me years ago, but I'm sorry girl, he last spoke of them a long time ago."

Sefeliim leaned forward, excitement growing in the pit of her stomach like an explosion of nervous butterflies waking up in the morning sun. "Is he still here?"

"Not anymore," Rachel replied, sadly. She looked away, sorrow lining her face. "He died about a year ago. He... he wasn't himself anymore. His mind was gone. Human condition, if you can believe it. Alzheimer's. But right at the end, right at the end he said there would be others, there had to be others. He asked me to look for them, so I got into this with Jeff and Rick. Supported them. Oh, but they're so earnest, always looking for aliens when they don't know..."

"... that they're part alien themselves, aren't they?"

"Yes, dear. That they are. Charlie and I, we had two beautiful children. A son and a daughter. Their father was my son, and he never knew, either." Rachel took a few steps down towards the drive to better peer at the car and the man inside, who was surveying them with no sign of impatience. "Oh, he's a nice looking man. If I was fifty years younger... but who am I kidding. My day is gone."

"Your Charlie," Sefeliim began carefully, "did he ever tell you his name?"

A surprisingly girlish giggle escaped from Rachel. "Oh dear, you know I couldn't pronounce his name if I tried. But, he did leave something for anyone who came after." Again, she tapped her head.

"May I...?"

"Of course." Rachel leaned on her cane with a half-smile, and closed her eyes, waiting. Sefeliim raised her hands, and touched them to the sides of Rachel's head, closing her own eyes for a few moments. Then she opened them again, to see Jeff staring at them from the doorway. "Go inside, Jeff," Rachel said without opening her eyes.

"Granma?" he asked hesitantly. Then, slightly more aggressive as he started towards them, "What's going on?"

"It's fine," said Sefeliim. Rachel waved him off again even as the man in the car got out. Sefeliim shot him a look. "Harrison. Stay in the car."

"We're well-past being due... elsewhere."

"And they'll wait for you, and you'd be bored as hell there, and we both know it. We're fine." She released Rachel's head. "Thank you."

"No, oh, thank you," Rachel said, and Sefeliim released there were tears in the older woman's eyes as she smiled. "Charlie was always my special secret. I couldn't share him with anyone. Made me feel special and loved in ways I hadn't before. The things he could do with his mind and his hands..."

"That film was his," Sefeliim realised.

"We lived in Walla Walla for about ten years after that, but nothing like that ever happened again. He said it was a... a... symposium."

"A Synomium?" Sefeliim asked in suddenly hushed tones.

"That might be it. Is it important?"

"The film, it looked like a molecular control device in operation. But the Synomiums, like all molecular control devices... they'd only if work... if..." her voice trailed off.

"But... what's going on here?" Jeff asked, confused and worried and defensive on his grandmother's behalf. "Are you really here from Japan?" His eyes widened in sudden understanding. "There were those rumours about a Japanese UFO interception force –"

"I'm not from Japan, and I'm not part of them." Sefeliim looked up into Jeff's eyes. Even with his shock of red hair, his eyes were uncannily like her own.

"Oh, they inherited Charlie's eyes," Rachel smiled to herself.

"Who are you?" Jeff demanded. Sefeliim noticed that people inside seemed to be stirring as if they sensed something was happening outside.

"I'm no one of any consequence," she said, upon considering. What was she going to say? _I'm really an alien. What you've been looking for all your life, that part of you that stirs inside and isn't fully human and realises it's not fully human. I can blow your mind and show you things no human could ever hope to show you_ – but then where would that leave her, and him, and Him? She glanced back at Harrison, back in the car again and waiting a little impatiently now.

"Are you a spook?"

"Goodness no," Rachel laughed, and grabbed her grandson's hand. "Now you're being rude to our special guest." She looked back at Sefeliim and smiled. "It has been good to meet you, Sef. Fifty years. Come back sometime, and I'll tell you what I know about Charlie. How we met. How we lived." She shifted her gaze to the car and the military man inside. "I think you might need that talk soon."

Sefeliim smiled hesitantly. "I'd... I'd like that, if I'm welcome."

"Call me. I'm sure you'll be able to get the number." Rachel tapped her head again. "I'm only a thought away, after all." She looked up at her grandson again. "Take me inside. And safe journey."

She watched a confused and worried Jeff take his grandmother back inside before retreating to the car. She knew others were watching from the door and windows, but ignored them for the most part. Let them think she didn't know. She slid into the passenger seat and clipped her seat belt on before Lefont began driving.

"Did you get what you wanted?" he asked after a few streets.

"I think so," she replied. "That old woman, she knew one of my people."

"Did she?"

"Married him for fifty years. Had children." Sefeliim fell silent, and she realised her Harrison didn't quite know what to say, either. He wasn't in uniform, he didn't have the usual reserve he had about him that kept her at arm's length. Instead, the sense that he was missing something in his life seemed to sing out to her even more.

Perhaps because she now recognised it within herself.

"Harrison... do you... for the sake of a hypothetical... do you think there could ever be..." _Be what? Love? Physical and emotional love between us? A bond that reaches through decades and outlasts us both with children having more children until we're nothing more than a footnote in history, an eternal testament to the commitment and feeling between us? I know now you know it's there as well. And I know it's there as well, now. And I can't act on it because I don't know how._ "Peace between our people?" she finally asked.

Harrison gave her a slightly confused look. "Well, sure. If they stopped killing my people, I'm sure something could be arranged. I'm sure we have a lot we can offer each other." There was a question in his eyes, and Sefeliim for the moment decided to ignore it.

"I hope so," was all she said. "Wake me when we get to the base excavation site." With that, she lowered the back of the chair, turned on her side, and pretended to sleep for the rest of the drive.

To be continued.

Author's Notes:

Oh look, new chapter. I've been trying to write things for a while and they just keep stalling, so this weekend I decided to throw another X-Com shrimp on the barbie and expand on what the world knows of the secret war so far. Also, Roswell in the world of X-Com. Not everything has been revealed, not by a long shot, and we have a few new recurring characters. And yes, the new X-Com base is in New Mexico. More next chapter.


	8. XCom 8

DISCLAIMER: Relatively standard stuff. Existing character types (specifically the alien races), certain vehicles and buildings, and so forth are properties of Microprose or whomever now holds the rights (2k Marin?). As the characters are original, the characters are my property, and so's the story (but plot for events belongs to Microprose or current other owner), hence ownership and copyright of them belongs to me. Contact me at .au if you want permission to use anything I've written for whatnot purposes.

X-COM: Enemy Unknown

By

Raymond Cooper

_**Orders of Business**_

Sefeliim looked up through the repurposed Atlas launching site, from the floor of what would be the new X-Com base's main elevator room up to the heavy-duty doors giving access to the world above. Beside her, Colonel Harrison Lefont, overall commander of X-Com, ran through a checklist with one of the engineers working on the excavations. In the middle of the room, the ground had been dug up, and a series of powerful engines were being installed to power the elevator. Three engineers ducked and dived around the machinery they were installing, and Sefeliim gave them a quick look. This wasn't her kind of trip. Not since the last weekend, when she had attended a UFO group meeting, and found that another of her kind had been here until only the year before. The woman he had lived his life with had stayed behind when he died, waiting for someone else from his people to come along. Sefeliim didn't want to be here, she wanted to be with Rachel, or she wanted to be far, far away where she wouldn't be tempted by any of these emotions she felt swirling inside her now.

She realised Lefont was saying something to her. "Sorry, what?"

"You seem distracted." He hesitated. He'd been doing that a lot this last week. She didn't know why. Maybe the revelation there were possibly more of her kind, more Sectoids or Greys or Reticulans or Septaloids or... whatever slang was currently in vogue. Maybe because she was here with him and he knew she didn't want to be there with him. Maybe... it could be a lot of maybes, she reflected. She really didn't want to give it much thought. That way lay madness. "Did you want to go see Suzuka? You don't need to be here."

Was it perhaps his mistrust of her then putting him on edge? Sefeliim didn't know. She'd thought that they had mostly conquered the mistrust he had for her, but maybe she had read the situation wrong. Maybe he wanted her compartmentalised and removed from being able to affect anything. Maybe he thought that now she knew there were other free Sectoids that she would want to run away and join them. "If... if that's okay with you," she replied after only a second or two.

Lefont waved a hand dismissively and returned to his checklist. "Now, the base stores..."

Sefeliim fled through one of the doors into what would be the lower floor of the base.

The massive elevator shaft let into a series of corridors. These hadn't been part of the original Atlas missile launch facility. While there had also been an elevator to raise the missile into launching position in the silo behind Sefeliim, it wasn't suitable for the purposes Lefont needed it to be used for, and so was being completely rebuilt.

Up above, the corridors were mostly circular, with supporting ribs every thirty centimetres or so. Those corridors led to rooms only just under the surface of the desert above and contained complicated radar equipment that was variously being overhauled and replaced and brought up to current specs. Advanced communications gear and dedicated computer hardware was also being installed on the upper levels. Deeper down at the bottom of the silo shaft was where all the heavy excavation was going on, where Sefeliim was now. She stopped to watch from a wide doorway was a concrete truck poured the initial stages of a new hangar floor. This would be where one of the replacement F-22X Interceptors would be stationed, the rock and dirt above already replaced by a squared-off shaft for the VTOL jet to raise and land through, with the doors hidden in the surface of the desert above already in place and rated. After a few moments, she continued on deeper into the base.

Mostly, the corridors here on the lower level were wide and heavily buttressed. Lefont had said that like Base Europa this facility needed to be ready for anything. She noticed weapons lockers being installed, or left lying on the ground waiting to be installed. There was the exit for the medical bay, where a number of doctors were directing some rookies moving beds and equipment into the places they would be bolted down, again presumably in case of "unforeseen circumstances". Sefeliim had to admit, these unforeseen circumstances had probably been rapidly shaped after the Shoreditch incident and the destruction of the supply ship there. If so, calculating the relative destructive capabilities of the ship that had caused the deaths of a number of people in Shoreditch, one of X-Com's pilots who had disobeyed orders, and also destroyed the captured saucer led Sefeliim to believe that this base wasn't buried enough for the safety of the crew.

She guessed that Lefont knew, too. He had... how did the humans put it? Weight on his shoulders. So much weight. This last month, he had strangely muted. And now there was the silence.

Just past the medical centre was the stores area – or at least, it was signposted but not yet actually excavated. As it was one of the smaller areas, it was expected to take a few days to dig out, another few days installing and waiting for the cement to dry, and then lastly a few days to set everything up. It was planned that a storage area for any alien artefacts recovered would be excavated on the far side of the stores room, but as yet there wasn't the budget for it. On the right just past the stores was the common room – one of the first areas actually finished, and through that were the bunk rooms, and the mess hall off the common room on the side opposite from the first hangar.

Hiroto would be in one of the three, most likely. She too was muted, her lustre no longer so bright. She wasn't eating properly, and Sefeliim feared unless she got through her psychic ordeal she would do something terrible and stupid and sad.

She was acutely aware how many easily obtainable guns existed on the average X-Com base.

The former member of the Kiryu-Kai sat hunched over on one of the comfortable chairs in the common room, her feet tightly together and her forearms resting on her thighs, hands dangling down. She stared at the floor, at one of the fractal patterns in the linoleum that had been chosen for the flooring in this room.

"Good to see you up, Squaddie."

Suzuka didn't move. "Hi."

"It's unusual to see you out of bed this early lately. That's a good sign."

"If you're trying to cheer me up, don't."

"You didn't do anything." Sefeliim knew where the conversation was going. For over a month now, she had been slowly stepping Hiroto through the events of the Shoreditch mission. She knew that, deep down, Hiroto remembered the intrusion into her mind, the jerk of her muscles as she responded to another's commands. She woke up to herself in the Skyranger, although she had walked back there with medical staff, and had remembered almost shooting Sylvia Anderson in the head. If the other woman hadn't acted so quickly and coolly, she would have and would have had no choice in the matter.

"I should have been stronger," the Japanese woman admitted. "They got inside my head and they... they made me _do _something."

"Hiroto, one of these days, I'm going to show you something. I'm going to tell you something you'll find unbelievable and that's going to scare you greatly. But still it won't scare you as much as this intrusion has." Sefeliim sat on the arm of the chair, next to Hiroto and patted her shoulder. "Then, you'll look back at this and you'll know what I'm saying is the truth. There wasn't anything you could have done. Think of it as... think of it as rape. Not physical, but mental." Something sparked in the other woman's mind, and Sefeliim closed her eyes. "Of course, that's how you already think of it." _Why didn't I pick up on that before? I'm smarter than this. I watch all this TV._ "I've said before that I can teach you how to stop that. How to block people from your mind like that. It's not always successful at first, so I need you to trust me completely, that I'm not going to hurt you or use you like then. But I need to be able to do that to show you how you can resist, how you can fight back. I want to start teaching you today."

Hiroto nodded, a little distant, but she was interested. Sefeliim glanced over her shoulder, to where she knew Sylvia stood in the doorway to the Mess. "I'm going to take her out for a ride. I need a driver anyway."

"Where are you going?"

"Roswell, ultimately, but first... just down the road a little." Sefeliim gave a concerned glance down at Hiroto's head. "We have some things to talk about in private, and there are too many ears here." She took Hiroto's hand, and stood, pulling the taller woman up from her chair and towards the door. "Come on. We'll go get the keys from the Commander."

Lefont handed them keys to one of the cars on the surface without question or comment, and again Sefeliim had the urge that something was lurking beneath the surface. There was concern for his soldier, but something different for the disguised Sectoid. They ascended to the surface, picked out the car, and headed off towards Roswell, thirty kilometres to the south.

Five minutes drive down the road, Sefeliim pointed out a small track that led off the highway and had Suzuka pull up in a small dip away from the road, with some scattered dying shrubbery around for cover. She got out of the car, eyes darting around quickly to ensure there were no immediate witnesses, and while Suzuka got out from behind the wheel, Sefeliim leaned back in, popped the glove compartment and pulled out an automatic pistol. With hesitant fingers, she checked that the clip was full and that the safety was still on. "Here," she said, holding the gun to Hiroto. "You might feel you need this shortly."

"I don't –"

"Just stand there. This, this is a little bit of a secret back in Wales. Harrison knows, a couple of the researchers know, but no one else... no one else really does." Sefeliim squared off her shoulders and drew herself up to her not-so-impressive full height. "But for me to teach you how to stop from being mind controlled, I need to do it to you so you know what to look for and how to fight it. Do you understand?"

"That makes sense but how could you –"

"Remember I was recovered from an alien escape pod? And Harrison told everyone I had been abducted and managed to make an escape?"

"Yes, but –"

"And that I was a member of the Kiryu-Kai?"

"Well, yes, but I never saw you –"

"It was all a lie."

"Yes, but – wait, a lie? How... how a lie?" Hiroto's fingers tightened unconsciously around the gun. Sefeliim found she was very conscious of the act, but continued.

"I'm not human. I'm one of them. A Grey, a Sectoid, whatever you want to call me."

"No, you're – you're human and you're –"

Sefeliim stepped back and closed her eyes. A second figure appeared in between them, brown, Sefeliim's exact height, large, angular and impassive black eyes, no thumb. A Grey. Suzuka's hand with the pistol now snapped up, the safety off.

"Move, I have to shoot," she said.

"I'm not moving, Hiroto. That's me, as I would normally look." Sefeliim stepped in front of the mental projection now. "I only look like you. I'm not human."

"The Commander wouldn't have an alien on his base, he wouldn't –"

"I'm an asset. And I'm not like _them._ I don't know what they are, but they're not my people any longer."

"Then what are you? What are they?"

"I think, as they can control you, they themselves are being controlled by something else. But unlike you, they don't have the ability to stop it anymore."

"I couldn't stop it! I saw what it was making me do and I couldn't stop myself!"

"Because you didn't know what was happening! You didn't know _how_ to stop it! I can teach you that!"

"So you can get in my head and make me do bad things again? Make me kill people?"

Sefeliim reached out with her mind and grabbed Hiroto's. The first lesson had to come now. "I have you. You have a loaded gun with the safety off. Right now, you have it aimed right. Between. My. Eyes. You can't miss. I have control of your trigger finger, your hand, your arm, your eyes. I have you in my grasp. And I am going to make you shoot me."

"No," Hiroto gasped.

"Oh, yes, you will. Because you're not strong enough to fight back. You're not strong enough to do what has to be done. You're weak, despicable, cowardly. You can't face what you did and so you're hiding and I'm here to make sure _you can never hide again_. I will always be here, watching, waiting for you to be _weak_ and _contemptible_ and then you will be mine. I am _in your head_." Sefeliim saw tears form in the corners of Hiroto's eyes. "In a moment, you are going to pull the trigger. You are going to _end my life_. You will kill me, and then drive back to Harrison and tell him you have put me out of his misery, because I have to be controlling him, too, don't I? You can't let me around your staff, your soldiers, your families and friends. Because _I'm an alien_. Do you get it now? Your finger, is just pulling back a little now. Not enough for you to actually shoot me yet, but enough for you to savour the moment. Taste that flavour on your tongue, it tastes like victory. Triumph. I'm pulling your finger back further now... further... another moment and you'll have shot me in the head."

Hiroto's other hand slapped up just as her finger tightened on the trigger, and the pistol discharged into the air above Sefeliim's head. The illusion behind her collapsed, and she too fell to her knees, gasping for air from the strain. "That's so not easy," she gasped.

Hiroto walked towards her for a few steps before breaking into a jog. When she reached Sefeliim, the alien looked up just in time for Hiroto to lay a resounding slap across her face.

"Don't you ever do that again!"

Sefeliim fell onto her side, and rolled onto her back. "But you didn't shoot me."

"That's not the point! I don't want anyone making me... you... you were never in danger," she realised.

"Oh, I was. If you hadn't figured out that the more control I was putting into one part of you, the easier you'd find it to resist in other parts, you would have shot me right between the eyes."

"Why? Why put yourself at that... are you really an alien?"

"Yes, I am."

Hiroto pulled Sefeliim to her feet. "No," she said, shaking her head. "You're too talkative."

"I'm way too talkative. I keep blurting things out and then have to cover for it later. My name? Names of things... I can't say too much because I don't know if the enemy have anyone like me around. But my people are naturally talkative. Just," she tapped the side of her head with a significant look. "Up here rather than through our mouths. We don't have a filter."

"I wanted to shoot you."

"Why didn't you?"

Hiroto looked up. There was something in her face that spoke a thousand words, but whether it was hate, fear, acceptance or something else entirely, Sefeliim wasn't sure. "Because it wasn't me pulling the trigger. As much as I hate aliens for what they did to me, I want to be the one making the decision."

"That's a start."

"It would have felt good, though." She raised the pistol again and pointed it at Sefeliim, who for a moment felt her heart freeze and seemingly miss a beat. But the heat was gone and Hiroto let her hand drop after a moment, re-engaging the safety on the pistol. "Real good. But that wasn't what I felt in London."

Sefeliim shook her head. "No. I'm not that strong at this. If you hadn't been as depressed and as surprised as you were, I may not have been able to hold you even that long." She shrugged, enjoying the feeling of still being able to do so now that she had found her tongue again. "They have been controlled by... I don't know what. And I think it used something on you. Sylvia said it had a globe of some kind? We have some of them back at base, but I haven't been able to get them to do anything, so I think it may be broken."

"You... want to use one of their mind-control devices?" Hiroto's free hand strayed again to the pistol.

"We have to know what they're doing before I can teach you all to resist it." Sefeliim gestured back at the car. "I do really want to meet with someone in Roswell. Would you still like to accompany me?"

Hiroto just looked. In her mind, Sefeliim felt waves of discomfort from the Japanese woman, but they were dying down. "You really don't want to kill everyone?"

"My people before this were largely pacifists," Sefeliim explained. "We would defend ourselves, but we never – and I mean _never_ – went out to find or make trouble." She hopped back into the car, in the passenger seat. "And what I've just told you? I will be telling the others. Mostly as I train them in techniques to resist mind control attempts, but this has to come out. I need you all to trust me as much as I trust all of you."

"And you trust us by... hiding what you are?" Hiroto said, leaning on the driver's door before opening it and sliding in behind the wheel. Sefeliim noted that she kept the pistol in a carrier on the inside of the door. "By lying to us?"

"When I woke up, my own people were trying to kill me. I'd been asleep for over sixty million years. I ejected, and found myself in a world being besieged by my own people and as far as I knew until last week, I was the only member of my species still with the capacity for rational, intelligent, self-directed thought. You were all so scared and I could understand why. There's a reason I'm identifying more with humans than with my own people at the moment. I'm not just scared of how your people might react to seeing another Sectoid without knowing me, but I'm also scared of what 'my' people might do if they found me." Sefeliim gave a humourless bark of a laugh. "At best, I think I would end up like them."

Hiroto started the car, and drove back to the road, a little more animated now and more like the confident woman Sefeliim had first met in the back of a Skyranger. "Which way?"

"Into Roswell," Sefeliim confirmed. "I think some people have realised, but... telepathic I may be, but your people aren't by nature, so I don't read thoughts or anything. Except sometimes to get what a word or concept is."

"You pretend to be Japanese," Hiroto commented. "Do what I do when I don't want to talk to someone and pretend you don't understand them."

"Your grasp of English _is_ a lot better than I thought it would be," Sefeliim replied.

"I did live in England for ten years as a child. I wouldn't have lasted in schools there if I didn't understand the language."

The rest of the twenty minute drive to Trailing Heart Road was made with cautious smalltalk, Sefeliim eager to establish an honest relationship and Hiroto confirming that Sefeliim wasn't a threat to her or her friends. As they pulled up in the drive of the faded brick house, Hiroto slid the pistol into her waistband and draped her shirt over it. Sefeliim gave her a long-suffering look.

"What is it with you humans and your guns in situations that don't require them?" She sighed, exasperated. "Harrison wanted to send me here last weekend with an armed guard, figuring I'd blurt out 'I'm an alien!' before being dissected."

"And would you?"

"Oh no," Sefeliim said with a wide-eyed honest delivery, "I figured I'd say that after they dissected me."

The front door to the home opened as Sefeliim and Hiroto got out of the car, to find Jeff in the shade afforded by the overhang of the roof. He still wore the suspicious look he'd had the weekend before when Sefeliim had last been here. "I guess you're multiplying now," he said as he let the two X-Com agents into the house.

"No, she's Japanese," Sefeliim replied, before recalling that had been the nationality she'd last time. "I mean, she's actually Japanese."

"You already said you weren't Japanese. So what about you?" Jeff asked as he showed the two women into his lounge. Rachel sat comfortably in the chair she'd been in during the meeting. Jeff's laptop had been moved from the coffee table, and some of the chairs were missing, but on the television was a paused image from the black and white film Sefeliim had seen, with a street in Washington state being destroyed from something Jeff nor anyone else at the meeting had been able to explain.

"I'm from... further afield." Sefeliim sat on one of the couches when Jeff gestured at it, and after a moment Suzuka also sat. "Is your brother still here?"

"He's here for the week, goes home tomorrow." Jeff shrugged, not wanting to disarm his defences. Whatever this woman had done to his grandmother, he wasn't going to let himself be taken the same way. "He's up in his room at the moment. He'll be down shortly."

"I'd prefer it if you went to your room as well, dear," Rachel cooed, smiling at him. Jeff's scowl deepened.

"I'm not leaving you alone."

"They won't hurt me, silly. She's here again to hear more about your grandfather, God rest his soul."

Sefeliim could feel Hiroto's eyes boring into her skull but she couldn't say anything yet. She hadn't told the X-Com squaddie what they were here for, either. Instead, she smiled at Jeff again. "You can stay if you'd like, but people who listen in to conversations never hear the things they want to hear. It's always bad, always things they don't want to hear." She paused and gave him a critical stare. "Do you _really_ want to know things about yourself that you don't know?"

"Like what?" Jeff challenged.

"That you're a fat, nosey boy," Rachel threw in.

"I'm not fat!"

"Of course you're not. But I don't want you here anyway. Shoo, shoo. Go make us some drinks. Tea for the one that wasn't here last weekend, and we've got some strawberry ice cream for the one who was." Sefeliim's eyes lit up at that. Jeff gave the two women another glare before standing.

"How do you have your tea?"

"White with one, please," Hiroto replied.

"He really is a good boy," Rachel said as Jeff left the room. "So earnest, so wanting to know. And he thinks you're with the government."

"We're not," Hiroto affirmed. "Well, not really."

"We're not," Sefeliim replied firmly. "But we did come to talk about your husband. Charlie, I think you said his name was?"

"Yes, Charlie. I promised you next time you came that I would tell you how he came to be here. You've got to remember, this was over fifty years ago now. My memory isn't what it used to be so some parts are spotty. But the most of it, that's stuck in my mind as indelibly as the day I got married to Charlie."

She shifted in the chair as Jeff brought in two drinks and a bowl of ice cream before shooing him out of the room. "Now, where to start..."

* * *

She had never seen the spate of disks that had invaded New Mexico in the last two weeks, but Rachel Spencer had heard of them. Everyone had. And working at the hospital on an Air Force airbase, she heard a lot of rumours, gossip and innuendo. On this particular day, she just shook her head and went back to writing her patient notes. One of the military police who were stationed on the Roswell Army Air Field had minor food poisoning and was throwing up in the ward behind her; she was making sure his fluids were being kept up, but otherwise it was a slow day and she was taking the chance to catch up on work. It was hot, and while she caught up on patient observation notes Rachel found herself wondering if there would be another thunderstorm like the one the night before to cool things down.

One of the nurses from the next ward, Carly, came in around lunch time. "Did you hear? Michael, from the control tower, he's over in my ward for a stomach bug and he's telling everyone he got a radar return on one of those disks yesterday. Bounced right back! There were reports of something being out there and all, couple a people saw a silvery disk thing north of the town."

"That's great," Rachel muttered, bending lower over her work in an attempt to seem too busy to talk.

"And there's talk from the MPs, they're saying if an alien comes here they'd shoot it. That'd be kinda sad, don't you think? All that way, thousands or millions of miles, and then BANG dead, because of men playing with their guns."

"As I recall, you like playing with their guns."

Carly gave a scandalised shriek that she immediately clamped down on before glaring at her friend. "Oh, _you_ can talk. How many soldiers this month? Huh? I know of four. You're so bad."

Rachel sighed and realised she was going to get no work done. "What I do is my business. And what I'm trying to do now is work."

"Oh, I bet you're thinking of David's gun right now, aren't you? Or is it Thomas's this week?" She gave a hoot as Rachel threw a book at her, and danced out of the office. "Or Deeeeeeean!"

"I'll kill her," Rachel muttered again before trying to go back to work.

That afternoon, she clocked off, and caught the bus into town. Being in the middle of the desert, Roswell wasn't very large. The Army Air Field held several thousand people, which was a sizeable minority of the town's population. At any time, it wasn't unusual to see young men with severe haircuts in uniform walking the streets. Walking towards home from her bus stop, she saw one of the local ranch foremen talking animatedly with the Sheriff on the street. As she passed, she heard "Flying disk" and "Debris" but not a lot else. It didn't interest her; no, Carly had hit the nail on the head with her comments about her soldier-boys. Rachel was indeed interested in the male specimens of humans, not little green Martians.

That night, she was woken by the sounds of vehicles heading through town. It was after 9PM, and that was usually a quiet time in the sleepy town, and a quick look out her window showed her that a dozen Army and Air Force vehicles – cars and trucks both – were heading north out of the town. She leaned on her windowsill with her elbows, wondering. Where were they going? What were they doing? Behind her, in her bed, Dean shifted slightly before bursting out snoring. It had been a good night. She was satisfied. Well, mostly satisfied. So why was she being drawn into following?

Regardless of her doubts, Rachel was dressed in a couple of minutes, and down from her upstairs apartment to the lot behind the building where her car was. Another couple of minutes, and she was following some late vehicles to the convoy up US 285.

Either no one in the convoy caught sight of her following, or more likely they didn't care what another vehicle was doing on the road at this time of night. Possibly... Rachel wasn't sure, and although she was far enough back that she wasn't immediately obvious the moon had only just been full a few nights earlier and the night was still bright. Add to the fact they were travelling through mostly flat land, and even hanging back nearly a mile, she could see tail lights and she had to guess they could see her headlights.

They drove north until they hit the intersection with State Road 42, when the convoy turned west, and headed towards Corona. There wasn't much of interest there, Rachel thought, and found herself following. Less than 20 miles from Corona, she lost track of taillights ahead of her.

She accelerated slightly, trying to see where the convoy had reached ahead of her, but something twinkled in the corner of her eye and she turned to her left, and caught a brief flicker of red before it went out of sight. They'd turned south again. Now this was growing really perplexing. There was nothing south of NM-42 other than ranches, dust and low scrub – usually all three at the same time. "Do I go or do I go home?" she asked herself aloud, pulling over to the shoulder of the road to consider it. A car passed from Corona heading back into the desert. Once its taillights disappeared, all life fled again and Rachel was all alone in the cosmos, stars wheeling above her. She seemed to drift in and out of consciousness, her head turning and spinning, and when her head lolled to the right, she caught sight of something out off the road. She opened the car door, and staggered out into the desert, stumbling like the drunken sailors she'd once seen while studying in San Diego.

For a mile, she weaved and wove her way through scrub, somehow dodging holes in the ground, a fence that came out of nowhere and vanished further into the night, and at least one stream that had started running again after the recent storm. In the distance, she could see another storm, lightning flicking down on the edge of the horizon. Where she staggered was for the moment cloudless, but that could change at any time. Strangely, she was not concerned. Rachel felt she should be panicking at the state of mind she found herself in, but it wasn't unpleasant.

Presently, she found herself at a small disc, flat, maybe nine feet across and two and a half feet high at its highest point. It was featureless, and as if she had any clue what the object was, she reached out and lightly ran her fingers across a segment. It lit up under her fingers, and then a seam appeared on the rim. The top of the disc rotated – without features Rachel couldn't say how many times it rotated, but eventually it stopped and then slid away from her.

Inside the disc was a man, short, tanned skin and dark hair. His eyes opened, and his irises were so dark they may as well have been black. He seemed Asiatic to Rachel – his eyes were intense and tilted downwards slightly towards his nose – and although the war hadn't been all that long ago and there had been all that hoopla about the Japs and still the Yellow Peril that even her father had talked about when she was young, this man had to be the most handsome man she had ever seen.

He was also quite, quite nude.

He seemed to be at a loss with what he should do next. Rachel still felt giddy, but found herself coming out of the weird state of mind she had been in. Remembering her manners, she reached out a hand to help the man out of the disc.

"Are you hurt?" she asked straight up, checking his body in the moonlight for signs of injury. She felt a sensation in her head that felt for all the world like someone rummaging for something in a drawer.

"No," he replied simply, gazing first at her before turning his eyes to the vista surrounding them. "Unbelievable. This just simply wasn't here before."

_Goodness, he must be concussed, _Rachel thought to herself. Aloud, she asked, "This desert has been here at least as long as man."

The man's gaze returned to her. It was straight, his eyes not flickering from her, direct. Very unusual. "Man... you mean like you."

"Ha ha, I'm a woman, you goose," Rachel chuckled, before running her hands lightly through the man's hair checking for obvious signs of head injuries – bumps, bleeding, something shifting under her fingers – but found nothing that gave any sign of trauma. He didn't flinch at her touch, either. "You seem to be in fine condition."

"Your people, they were not here before."

"This is New Mexico," Rachel answered the statement. "There's been people here, or hereabouts, for hundreds of years."

"Hundreds... how long have I slept?"

"You tell me."

He turned his eyes to the sky, darting from one star to another before frowning in confusion. He turned back to Rachel. "There were... large... reptiles when I last saw this region. Should we not leave before they return?"

"Large reptiles? Like gators or something?"

"No, bigger," the stranger said, holding his hands a short distance apart vertically. "This is you." He moved his hands so they were about four or five times further apart. "This big, in relative terms."

Now Rachel was confused. "There hasn't been reptiles like that seen in New Mexico that I know of. But sounds like you mean dinosaurs or something." Again, she felt a sensation behind her eyes with the mental flash she had of dinosaurs.

"Yes! Dinosaurs."

"Honey, there haven't been dinosaurs here in, oh, millions of years."

"I see." He fell silent for a moment, and it hit Rachel then just how weird this was. She was in the middle of a desert, with a silvery disc and an unusual man who – while he could pass for Chinese – was definitely not a local in any sense of the word. "I have a... favour to ask of you, if you would hear it."

"Shoot."

The man paused as if parsing Rachel's idiom comment into something he could understand then nodded. "I am a stranger to your world. I need a place to stay, for a short time at least. I've already abused your hospitality already in having you open this disc, I don't want to impinge on your goodwill any further unless you are willing."

With that, Rachel's state of intoxication that had led her from the road was explained. Strangely, she didn't feel upset or angry at the intrusion and after consideration she realised why. "I'm a nurse. I help people who need helping. You weren't... compelling me as much as calling for help. I would help again in an instant." She narrowed her eyes, though. "But, are you a... I don't know, a Facist or a Communist or something? I couldn't take you in if you were."

"No, I'm not... I'm neither of those," the man replied. "But I'm fleeing... enslavement and persecution, you could say."

* * *

"Enslavement and persecution?" Sefeliim echoed. "Those were his exact words?"

"Ye-es," Rachel replied, thoughtfully. "I asked him several times, but he said it was better I didn't know anything. That way, if I was ever questioned by the government, I wouldn't be able to dig myself in any deeper. Charlie was..." She fell silent, smiling as she remembered something from her shared past. "He was special. And loving. He loved being here so much. I fell pregnant within a year of us meeting. I didn't dally with the soldier boys after that, they were just... just children, playing at being men. Charlie... treated me right, and I wanted to give him that same respect."

"Did he ever say anything more about... about his circumstances? Why he escaped?"

"He did once make a funny that has stuck with me," Rachel admitted. "I didn't really get it. I didn't think it was much funny myself but I thought it was something from his past life. He realised what he'd said and wouldn't answer when I asked what he meant." Her eyes narrowed in concentration. "We were watching a debate between Nixon and Kennedy, and Nixon looked ill at ease and sweaty, and Kennedy had a look of confidence and control of the situation. Charlie, he looked at this and laughed, and said, 'You'd almost think one of the Brains of Morphoton was behind this.' I asked him what he meant, and he went quiet like he always did when I asked him why he left his people." Rachel gave a small shrug. "That's how I guessed it was related."

"Brains of Morphoton?" Sefeliim echoed, frowning. "No, that can't be..."

"Something you know?" Hiroto asked from her chair.

Sefeliim shook her head. "Not exactly. They're parasites, kind of. Beasts that look like a... a brain with eyes. Widely known for their attempt at mentally dominating the H'rrak about fifty – well, I guess sixty-four million and fifty years ago. But they were all wiped out. I thought they were all wiped out. What would one be doing on T'leth?" She gave Hiroto a puzzled look.

"If that's what Charlie was referring to," Hiroto countered, raising the point.

"That's right," Rachel added. "I'm only guessing it was connected to his... absence without leave from your people. I may be mistaken." She sounded apologetic.

"No... no, it makes sense." Sefeliim got up and started pacing through the lounge. "But why now? Why would it wait until now? What would have changed? What was happening in 1947?"

"Rockets, military build-up into the Cold War after the Second World War, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history?" Hiroto offered.

"First black man playing in the Major League Baseball," Rachel nodded sagely. "And Roswell."

"And... first reported sighting of flying saucers," Hiroto added. "The Kenneth Arnold sighting."

"They weren't saucers, dear, more of a rounded boomerang shape."

"Right," Hiroto sighed. "Flying wings. Seen late June 1947."

"So, either T'leth had woken by then, or T'leth was woken by this arrival." Sefeliim continued to pace, rubbing one hand back and forth absently across her chin as she through possible scenarios in her head. "So, the remnants of T'leth picks up a signal. It wakes up, starts a wake cycle of anyone in suspension from the crash – there's plenty of crew in stasis, plenty more in crash stasis. Sends out wake-up messages to escape ships, other sections of the ship – wakes something up in the hold, one of the brains. That has somehow escaped extinction and infested a ship full of twenty million telepaths without anyone noticing. That sounds completely plausible." She sighed, frustration mounting, until Hiroto grabbed a hand as she walked past.

"Sit. Think. Be quiet."

Sefeliim held her eyes for a moment, then dropped her eyes, nodded and returned to her seat while taking a deep breath. "Thank you, Rachel. It was good to know there was another like me."

"There were more,' Rachel admitted, "Charlie told me the crew of the ship he ejected from were like him, not controlled, not being manipulated. But either they died, or they were taken to the Army Air Base and then moved to Fort Worth or somewhere else. Area 51, maybe. That's where everything alien gets taken, isn't it?"

"I think Area 51 just handles captured Russian aircraft," Hiroto said after a few moments' silence.

"You would say that, dear," Rachel cooed. Hiroto sighed.

"No, I'm serious. I'll tell you now, anything that gets recovered is studied elsewhere." She looked uncomfortable at having given that much information. "Please don't ask me where because I will not be able to tell you. It's just that people claiming Area 51 is where aliens and UFOs are studied really annoys me, because it's not true."

"Okay, okay." Rachel held up her hands in surrender.

"And the other important point," Sefeliim added, "you said you fell pregnant. _How_ did you fall pregnant?"

Rachel's eyes twinkled. "I'm sure you don't need me to tell you where babies come from, do I?"

"No, but – it should be biologically impossible."

"But you're human right now, aren't you?"

Sefeliim made to answer, and then stopped. That was a really good question. Her camouflage wasn't a hologram, it was a deep-seated biological program that actively changed her genetic structure from her actual self to a human norm, and would allow her to change back. Strange; she hadn't really thought through on the possibilities of that fact. The realisation gave her a sense of surprise. "Oh my, I can have babies. Little human babies."

"Oh, they have some of your original material in there somewhere," Rachel added. "I don't understand how. I was only a nurse, not some kind of genetics scientist. Neither was Charlie. It was a surprise to him as well."

Sefeliim looked horrified. "I can have human babies." She turned to Hiroto quickly. "Can I have them by myself?"

"Uhhh... why don't you ask one of the doctors back at base all these sorts of questions."

"But you should know!"

"Anata no orokana eigo o reikashiteinai, anata wa baka desu ne." Hiroto folded her arms and looked out the window, clearly stating the conversation was over.

Sefeliim looked disappointed, but heard Rachel giggle. "Oh sure. You all _think_ this is a stupid question, but we'll see who's laughing when I self-spawn some insectoid monster that goes on a rampage. We'll see." Sefeliim held the accusatory tone for a moment longer before sniggering. "But seriously, I don't know what I can do, so it's a valid question."

"Well, Charlie didn't have babies himself," Rachel said. She shook her head. "No, that was still a two-person job."

The three women slowed down into small talk for a time, before Jeff returned to the lounge. Sefeliim took that as a hint to leave, and stood. "I'd like to thank you for talking to me further about your husband."

"Oh, it was my pleasure. At my age, anything to keep the memories fresh. He was such a beautiful man."

"I'll show you out," Jeff said, leading Sefeliim and Hiroto to the door. Hiroto waved, and Sefeliim gave Rachel a quick hug before leaving and promising the older woman to keep in touch. Jeff was still hostile when they reached the car. "I don't know what kind of hold you have over my grandmother, but I don't want you speaking to her again. I don't want you coming around here anymore."

"I can understand your suspicions, but I mean your grandmother no harm."

"You do have an ulterior motive though, and she's an old woman. I won't let her be taken advantage of."

"I can assure you, we're not with the government if that's what your fear is. We have... mutual interests and acquaintances."

From the other side of the car, Hiroto glared at Jeff. "She's a grown woman. If she decides she wants to talk to Sef she can talk to Sef."

"She's an old woman. And as much as she has supported my brother and I in the last few years, and as much as she has been there for us through our lives, she's old now, and by herself, and it is up to Rick and I to look after her now."

Sefeliim laid her hand on Jeff's. "Please. Believe me when I say I want no harm to come to your grandmother. She's a remarkable woman. Sometime, ask her about her life. Please. Tape it, record it, write it, whatever." She ignored the jangling tone from Hiroto's pocket, while Hiroto dug for and answered her phone.

"Commander?"

"I bear none of you any ill will. In fact –"

"Save it, Sefeliim. We've got to go."

"What?"

"Commander says there's a new toybox. We've got to go _now._"

"Where is it?"

Hiroto pointed. Sefeliim turned and saw a silvery disc coast across the suburb, about two hundred metres up heading west. Jeff gaped, animosity forgotten for the moment before he bolted for the inside of the house. Sefeliim and Hiroto threw themselves into their seats, Hiroto gunning the engine and reversing out into the street.

"Commander says it seems to be coming down about thirty miles west of the city."

"Is there anything there?"

"Not that we know of. We're meeting up with him just outside town."

The car headed north until they were past the last of the homes on the main highway into Roswell, following the path Rachel had taken many years before, Sefeliim reflected to herself. Several times, Hiroto glanced into the rear view mirror, frowning, but she said nothing. Two kilometres out of town, Hiroto pulled sharply off the road to the left, driving several hundred metres into the dust and scrub beside the road. They came over a rise and saw the Skyranger ahead of them, but Sefeliim noticed that Hiroto was looking in the mirror again even as she stepped on the brakes and skidded to a stop. She threw her door open, pulling the pistol from her pants and thumbing the safety off as she stalked up the rise in the direction they had come from – a moment later, another car came over the rise.

"Jeff?" Sefeliim asked, halfway to the Skyranger.

"Out! Out of the car now," Hiroto yelled, grabbing Jeff's door and throwing it open. Jeff got out quickly, and found himself pushed up against the door while Hiroto frisked him. She pulled a camera out of a bag and waved it under Jeff's nose. "Is this all you have?"

"Ye – yes!"

"Are you armed?" She continued patting him down. Sefeliim jogged back to them.

"He's not armed. And calm down."

"He shouldn't be here."

"I have a right to know –"

"Oh sure you have a right to know –"

"- about the people my grandmother is talking to!"

Sefeliim felt him before she heard him, and her feelings came back – both sets, the urge to not be alone anymore, the urge to stay as far from him as she could to prevent herself being hurt from his lack of trust. Harrison, the Commander, her Harrison.

"What's going on here? We need to be in the air."

"Sorry sir, didn't have time to lose a tail."

Harrison looked at Jeff a little more closely. He turned to Sefeliim. "This your friend's grandson? The one who accosted you last week?"

Sefeliim nodded. "Yes." Harrison looked at her, waiting for something more. She didn't know what else to offer. "He didn't really accost me."

"What the hell is –" Hiroto raised her pistol towards Jeff's head. His eyes found the barrel and his tongue grew heavy, his world shrinking to the hole in front of him.

"Put the gun down, Squaddie." Hiroto lowered her pistol. "And the safety, please. Thank you." He faced Jeff now, put a hand on his shoulder and stared into his eyes. "Now, son, believe me when I say you want to get back into your car, and go home. You've seen a flying saucer today, fly right over your home. Oh yes, we checked. But you really want to get in your car, and go home and see to the safety of your family right now. This isn't a situation you want to be a part of. It's classified, above Top Secret, of a security clearance you won't ever find in your freedom of information trawling. What you'd see would shake up your view of the world forever, turn things upside down and then you would Know Too Much." Even Sefeliim could hear the capitals in those last three words. She reached out and touched Lefont's shoulder.

"Harrison –"

"It would be the adventure of a lifetime. You would see things you haven't before, and would never see again but they would leave you gibbering in an asylum. You would never again be able to look at a website or a newsgroup relating to UFOs and think, 'what are they? Why are they here?'. You'd _know."_

"Harrison!" He still ignored Sefeliim.

"If you got on that plane, right now, I could not guarantee your safety, physical or mental. I could not say you'll come out whole at the other end. There's a chance we might all die and no one would ever know why or where. Even in our own records, you'd just be given a number – a statistic. And no one would ever know you had seen the truth. So, just hop in your car, hop in your car, turn around and forget you ever saw this plane. Just turn around, and walk away, and be safe."

Harrison let Jeff go, and turned back to the Skyranger, walking back down the rise towards the forward entry ladder. Hiroto shot him a confused glance, then slid the pistol back into the belt of her pants and jogged after him. Sefeliim gaped at Harrison's back for a second before turning back to Jeff. "He's right; you really want to –"

Jeff pushed past her, and headed for the Skyranger leaving Sefeliim standing confused beside the cars. Harrison waited under both Hiroto and Jeff were onboard before turning back to Sefeliim. He gestured to the door, and getting the message, Sefeliim ran to the ladder and climbed up. Jeff was already being led into the back troop compartment by Hiroto, who was pulling off her shirt to replace it with armour and her uniform, and had already stowed the pistol in an equipment locker.

Once the door between the compartments was shut, and the Skyranger was lifting off, Sefeliim exploded. "How the **hell** can you let him come along? Why did you poke and prod him like that? You should be pushing him away, keeping this secret, not pushing every button he has so he has to come with us!"

Harrison leaned back, smiling privately to himself. "We'd have had to have brought him or his brother in at some point."

"Why? Because I talked to them? Because they might know something? Because – oh. Because they're part alien." Sefeliim deflated into her chair.

"Exactly. And we need to know whether he or his brother are a threat. How better to do that? Take them on an operation. Let him see what's going on, what we do, what's really happening in these things he's investigating. We also need some medical work done. Obviously he's healthy, but is he really half or quarter or whatever alien? How does that work? How does that happen? And is there anything he has in common with you that these other corpses we have don't."

"The mind control," Sefeliim realised.

"Exactly." Harrison closed his eyes for a few moments. "Believe me. I don't like blowing our cover like this. I don't like being secretive. I don't like pussy-footing around and lying and manipulating. But I think in this instance, it might be justified. He doesn't know, does he? What he is."

Sefeliim shook her head. "No. No, neither him nor his brother. Their grandmother is nice. But you could have told me."

Lefont opened his eyes in surprise. "But you're usually across everything I do. What's going on? You've been funny all week."

"_I've_ been funny?" Sefeliim blurted out incredulously. "Me? Me as in... me? And not you? You just act like you want to be rid of me."

"This trip hasn't been your idea of fun, I know that, and I've tried to let you get out and meet people, have some kind of life away from the base and away from everyone while we're here." Harrison pulled himself more upright in his chair, facing Sefeliim. "Back at Europa, we're largely isolated and there's not that many people on the base. But everyone there has families, friends, people they see and interact with outside of missions and duty schedules. You... you don't. You don't know anyone outside of our troopers and support staff. You're on a first name basis with our cleaning staff, you've swallowed all the reference books and videos we have on base, you've got to be bored stupid and, well, lonely." Lefont was concerned for her, Sefeliim realised, as he took her hands in his. "I don't know what it's like for you. I admit that. You're smart. You're very smart. The things you can do, the level you operate on – and you're stuck in a hole in the ground with mostly boneheaded soldiers for company. I wanted you to have the chance to... to make connections while we were over here, people you could talk to, work on your own projects, have a chance to unwind and relax."

"Oh, Harrison, you... you... anata wa baka desu ne, I think was what Hiroto said about me, and if I understood what she meant correctly, it applies to you, too. Idiot." She smiled. "My home is here. In more ways than one, yes, but my home is here. Earth. The people I live with, you're all more than stimulating enough to hold my attention and make me happy. I'm happy being of use to someone. It gives me focus and reason for continuing when really all I want to do is curl up into a ball and sing songs to myself that would threaten the sanity of anyone who listened."

"Because of your alien tongue?"

"Because I'm a terrible singer. Really, didn't you hear me at karaoke the other week?" Sefeliim chuckled to herself. "I am not wanting for anything. Don't misunderstand me, I appreciate being able to go out and about, and Sylvia has promised to take me shopping for... for girly things in the next couple of days. Which is confusing me, because I thought Sylvia was about as... 'ungirly' as one could be and still have a working –"

"I get the mental image."

"And that's something else. I don't read your mind. I don't read anyone else's. I might grab words or concepts, but unless someone asks me to – I don't read your minds. Privacy is something my people held very precious, since nearly everything we did was broadcast for all to hear, so here I am with a people who are _very_ private... frankly, it's kind of a relief."

"That you don't hear everyone else?"

"That's it exactly. I actually sleep pretty soundly, and I didn't know I didn't until I was here."

"But you don't... actually sleep..."

"I do," Sefeliim sighed, "but only briefly. Half an hour to an hour every couple of days is all I need. I can do more, but that's all I need. In fact –"

The intercom from the cockpit pinged, and Lefont picked up the handset. "Commander, go." He listened to the report from the other end. "Okay, circle twice, then put down about a hundred metres away. Put the rear door down away from the disc, give our troops some cover. Let us know what you see in the mean time." He put the handset down again and stood up to move into the rear compartment. "I'm sorry, we'll have to continue this another time."

Sefeliim smiled, a little uncertain but more confident than she had been, and relieved. She reached out and touched Lefont's forearm. "It's okay. It's okay. I think we can be professional now."

To be continued.

Author's notes:

New chapter! And what really happened at Roswell, X-Com style. Or one person's view of it at the very least, which is enough to piece together the rest of it. History will be something I'll visit throughout this series from time to time, but for now we'll mostly be moving back to the present day – or as present as we can be in 1999.


End file.
